Ml/5090 

copy z 



TkfMibitlCK — 



Copy z 



7f^ fefcofcs of 

f^SMtbibcK 



HV 5090 
.M4 A5 
Copy 2 



f~ 



1'he Errors of Prohibition. 



AN ARGUMENT 

DELIVERED IN THE 

REPRESENTATIVES' HALL, BOSTON, 

.AJPHIDL, 3, 1867", 

BEFORE A 

JOINT SPECIAL COMMITTEE OE THE GENERAL 
COURT OF MASSACHUSETTS. 



By JOHN A. ANDREW. 



BOSTON: 

TICKNOR & FIELDS, 124 TREMONT ST 

I867. 




V\\[50qO 



Is 









INTRODUCTORY. 



At the present annual session of the General Court of 
Massachusetts, commencing in January, 1867, petitions were 
presented by Alpheus Hardy and others, praying for enact- 
ment of a judicious license law for the regulation and 
control of the sale of spirituous and fermented liquors in 
the Commonwealth. The number of these Petitioners during 
the session already (April, 1867,) comprises thirty thousand 
legal voters, and is increasing daily. 

A petition was also presented by the principal inn-keepers 
in the city of Boston, praying for such changes in existing 
laws concerning the sale of wines and liquors as shall allow 
them to supply the wants of the guests of their houses, yet 
under such excise and regulation and subject to such super- 
vision as shall be deemed needful for the public good. 

A further petition was presented by the officers and trus- 
tees of the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy, representing 
that under the present statutes it is impossible legally to 
conduct that business and perform its duties to the medical 
profession and the sick, and praying for such amendment of 
the law as that apothecaries may be enabled to conduct their 
business in a legal manner. 

Various petitions, numerously signed, were also presented 
to the General Court, remonstrating against any amendment 
of the existing prohibitory statutes. 



All these petitions were referred to a Joint Special Com- 
mittee of the two branches of the legislature, composed of 

Messrs. Morse, of Norfolk, 

Alexander, of Hampden, 

Fay, of Suffolk, 

Dow, of Middlesex, 

Swan, of Bristol, 

On the part of the Senate ; and 
Messrs. Jewell, of Boston, 

Aldrich, of Worcester, 

Sherman, of Lowell, 

Wright, of Lawrence, 

Avery, of Brain tree, 

Flinn, of Chatham, 

McClellan, of Grafton, 

Bartlett, of Roxbury, 

Madden, of Boston, 
On the part of the House of Representatives. 

The Petitioners were represented before the Committee by 
Hon. John A. Andrew and Hon. Linus Child, as counsel ; 
and the Remonstrants were in like manner represented before 
the Committee by Hon. Asahel Huntington, Rev. A. A. 
Miner, D. D., and William B. Spooner, Esq., as counsel. 

The hearings were continued for four days in each week, 
(besides two evening sessions,) beginning February 19th, 
and ending April 3d, at first in the Senate Chamber, and 
afterwards in the Representatives' Hall, in the State House, 
at Boston. 

The opening argument for the Petitioners was made by 
Hon. Linus Child, and the following witnesses were called, 
sworn and examined in their behalf: — 



John Q. Adams, Esq., of Quincy, 
(Trial Justice for Norfolk County.) 
Rev. Nehemiah Adams, D. D., of Boston. 

Prof. Louis Agassiz, of Cambridge, 

(Prof, of Zoology and Geology in the Scientific School of Harvard College.) 
Rev. William R. Alger, of Boston. 
Joseph Andrews, Esq., of Boston. 

Rev. Leonard Bacon, D. D., of New Haven, Conn., 

(Professor of Didactic Theology in Yale College.) 

Rev. Charles F. Barnard, of Boston. 

Dr. George F. Bigelow, of Boston, 

(Secretary of the Howard Benevolent Association, and Physician at the 
Washingtonian Home.) 

Prof. Henry J. Bigelow, M. D., of Boston, 

(Professor of Surgery in the Medical School of Harvard College.) 
Hon. Henry W. Bishop, of Lenox, 

(Ex- Judge of the Court of Common Pleas.) 
Rev. George W. Blagden, D. D., of Boston, 

(Senior Pastor of the Old South Church.) 
Hon. J. C. Blaisdell, of Fall River. 

Rev. John A. Bolles, D. D., of Boston, 

(Rector of the Churcji of the Advent.) 
Prof. Francis Bowen, of Cambridge, 

(Alford Professor of Natural Theology, Moral Philosophy and Civil Polity 
in Harvard College.) 

Rev. Robert Brady, of Boston, 

(Pastor of St. Mary's Church.) 
Augustus O. Brewster, Esq., of Boston, 

(Ex-Assistant District-Attorney for Suffolk County.) 
A. M. Brownell, Esq., of New Bedford, 

(Municipal Marshal of that city.) 

Hon. E. P. Buffington, of Fall River, 
(Ex-Mayor of that city.) 

Brigadier-General Isaac S. Burrell, of Roxbury, 
(Ex-Municipal Marshal of that city.) 

Rev. B. F. Clark, of Chelmsford. 

Prof. Edward H. Clarke, M. D., of Boston, 

• (Professor of Materia Medica in the Medical School of Harvard College.) 
Hon. John H. Clifford, of New Bedford, 

(Ex-Governor and Ex-Attorney-General of the Commonwealth.) 
John C. Cluer, Esq., of Boston. 
Hon. Charles G. Davis, of Plymouth. 



E. Hasket Derby, Esq., of Boston. 
Rev. Manassas Doherty, of Cambridge. 
Hon. J. H. Duncan, of Haverhill. 

Right Rev. Manton Eastburn, D. D., of Boston, 

(Bishop of the Protestant Episcopal Church of the Diocese of Massachusetts.) 
Frank Edson, Esq., of Hadley, 

(Chairman of the Selectmen and Liquor Agent of that town.) 

Rev. Theodore Edson, D. D., of Lowell. 

Rev. George E. Ellis, D. D., of Charlestown. 

Rev. Rufus Ellis, of Boston. 

M. J. Fassin, Esq., of New York. 

Hon. Francis B. Fay, of Lancaster, 

(Ex-Mayor of Chelsea, and Trustee of the State Reform School for Girls 
at Lancaster.) 

Hon. Henry F. French, of Cambridge, 

(Ex- Assistant-District- Attorney for Suffolk County.) 

Addison Gage, Esq., of West Cambridge. 

Thomas Gaffield, Esq., of Boston. 

Hon. E. B. Gillette, of Westfield, 

(District- Attorney for the Western District.) 
Albert G. Goodwin, Esq., 

(Secretary of the Boston Provident Association.) 
Hon. Alpheus Hardy, of Boston. 

Benjamin W. Harris, Esq., of Milton, 

(Ex-District- Attorney for the South-Eastern District.) 
Rev. Michael Hartney, of Salem. 

Rev. George F. Haskins, of Boston, 

(Head of the House of the Angel Guardian.) 
Rev. James A. Healey, of Boston. 

Rev. Frederick H. Hedge, D. D., of Brookline, 

(Prof, of Ecclesiastical History in the Divinity School of Harvard College.) 
Henry Hill, Esq., of Braintree. 

Hon. George S. Hillard, of Boston, 

(United States District- Attorney for the District of Massachusetts.) 
Prof. Oliver Wendell Holmes, M. D., of Boston, 

(Parkman Professor of Anatomy and Physiology in the Medical School 
of Harvard College.) 

Prof. E. N. Horsford, of Cambridge, 

(Ex-Rumford Professor of the Application of Science to the Art of Life in 
the Scientific School of Harvard College.) 

Capt. David Hoyt, of Deerfield. 



Eev. G. B. Ide, D. D., of Springfield. 
Prof. Charles T. Jackson, M. D., of Boston. 

Prof. J. B. S. Jackson, M. D., of Boston, 

(Shattuck Professor of Morbid Anatomy in the Medical School of Harvard 
College.) 
Rev. John Jones, of Pelham. 

Col. John Kurtz, of Boston, 
(Chief of Police of the city.) 
Wm. M. Lathrop, Esq., of Boston. 
Eev. Thomas R. Lambert, of Charlestown. 

Louis Lapham, Esq., of Fall River, 

(Judge of the Police Court of that city.) 
Hon. George Lewis, of Roxbury, 

(Mayor of that city.) 
Hon. D. Waldo Lincoln, of Worcester, 

(Ex-Mayor of that city.) 
Hon. Frederic W. Lincoln, Jr., of Boston, 

(Ex-Mayor of the city.) 

Rev. Increase S. Lincoln, of Warwick. 

Rev. Samuel K. Lothrop, D. D., of Boston. 

Rev. J. C. Lovejoy, of Cambridge. 

Hon. Alfred Macy, of Nantucket. 

enry A. Marsh, Esq., of Amherst. 

Samuel F. McCleary, Esq., of Boston, 
(City Clerk.) 

Rev. Lawrence McMahon, of New Bedford. 

Hon. William S. Messervy, of Salem, 
(Ex-Mayor of that city.) 

Rev. Rollin H. Neale, D. D.,|f Boston. 

Lyman Nichols, Esq., of Boston. 

Hon. Otis Norcross, of Boston, 

(Mayor of the city.) 
Rev. J. B. O'Hagan, of Boston. 

P. L. Page, Esq., of Pittsfield, 

(Judge of the Police Court of that town.) 
Hon. Henry W. Paine, of Cambridge. 
Hon. John C. Park, of Boston. 

Charles Henry Parker, Esq., of Boston, 

(Manager of the Suffolk Institution for Savings.) 



8 



Hon. Joel Parker, of Cambridge, 

(Royall Professor in the Law School of Harvard College; formerly Chief 
Justice of the Supreme Court of the State of New Hampshire.) 

E. B. Patch,. Esq., of Lowell. 

Prof. Andrew P. Peabody, D. D., LL. D., of Cambridge, 

(Preacher to the University, and Plummer Professor of Christian Doctrine 
and Morals in Harvard College.) 

Hon. J. H. Perry, of New Bedford, 
(Mayor of that city.) 

Chase Philbrick, Esq., of Lawrence, 

(Municipal Marshal of that city.) 
Edward L. Pierce, Esq., of Milton, 

(District- Attorney for the South-Eastern District.) 
Rev. John Power, of Worcester. 
Rev. George Putnam, D. D., of Roxbury. 

Hon. George C. Richardson, of Cambridge, 

(Ex-Mayor of that city; Pres. of the Board of Trade of the city of Boston.) 
Rev. John P. Robinson, of Boston. 
Hon. Charles Russell, of Princeton. 

Hon. Charles Theodore Russell, of Cambridge, 
(Ex-Mayor of that city.) 

Hon. George P. Sanger, of Boston, 

(District- Attorney for Suffolk County.) 
Edward A. Savage, Esq., of Boston, 

(Deputy-Chief of Police of the city.) 
Rev. Thomas Shehan, of Taunton. 
J. E. Souchard, Esq., French Consul at Boston. 
Oliver Stackpole, Esq., of Boston. 
Prof. D. Humphreys Storer, M. D., of Boston, 

(Professor of Obstetrics and of Mescal Jurisprudence in the Medical School 
of Harvard College.) 

Rev. Patrick Strain, of Lynn. 

Rev. Edward T. Taylor, D. D., of Boston, 
(Pastor at the Seamens' Bethel in that city.) 
Minot Tirrell, Jr., Esq., of Lynn. 
Rev. John Todd, D. D., of Pittsfield. 
Rev. John E. Todd, of Boston. 

Rev. Joseph Tracy, D. D., of Beverly, 

(Lately Editor of the Boston Recorder.) 
Hon. George B. Upton, of Boston. 
Theodore Voelckers, Esq., of Boston. 



9 



Hon. G. Washington Warren, of Charlestown, 

(Judge of the Police Court, and Ex-Mayor of that city.) 

Hon. Emory Washburn, of Cambridge, 

( Bussey Professor in the Law School of Harvard College ; Ex-Governor of 
the Commonwealth ; and formerly Judge of the Court of Common Pleas. ) 

Eev. E. M. P. Wells, of Boston, 

(Rector of St. Stephen's Church.) 
Prof. James C. White, M. D., of Boston, 

(Assistant-Professor of Chemistry in Harvard College.) 
H. W. B. Wightman, Esq., of Chelmsford, 

(Treasurer of the Chelmsford Foundry Company.) 

Hon. Joseph M. Wightman, of Boston, 
(Ex-Mayor of the city.) 

Rev. Thomas Worcester, D. D., of Boston. 

In support of the petition of the College of Pharmacy, 
which was represented hy Messrs. Thomas Hollis, President, 
Samuel M. Colcord, Vice-President, and Henry W. Lincoln, 
Recording Secretary, as a special committee of its Board of 
Trustees, the following gentlemen appeared as witnesses : — 

Charles Edward Buckingham, M. D., 

(Surgeon of City Hospital, Boston.) 
Charles C. Bixby, of North Bridgewater, 

(Apothecary.) 

Isaac T. Campbell, of Boston, 

(Examiner of Drugs.) 
S. M. Colcord, of Boston, Apothecary, 

(Vice-President of Massachusetts College of Pharmacy.) 
Thomas Hollis, Apothecary, Boston, 

(President of the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy.) 
James L. Hunt, Apothecary, 

(Town Liquor Agent of Hingham.) 
Henry W. Lincoln, Apothecary, Boston, 

(Recording Secretary of Massachusetts College of Pharmacy.) 
William T. Rand, Dedham, 

(Formerly an apothecary.) 

Sampson Reed, Druggist, 

(Formerly an Alderman of Boston.) 

Frank W. Simmons, Apothecary, Boston. 

2 



10 

The opening argument for the Remonstrants was then 
made by Hon. Asahel Huntington, who was followed by 
William B. Spoon er, Esq., and after the examination of 
their witnesses, the Rev. A. A. Miner, on Tuesday, April 2d, 
delivered the closing argument in their behalf. He was 
followed, on Wednesday, April 3, by Hon. John A. Andrew, 
in behalf of the Petitioners, who closed the hearing with the 
following 



ARGUMENT. 



Mr. Chairman and Gentlemen of the Committee : — 

A measure so extreme and unusual as the 
statute of Massachusetts — prohibiting the sale of 
spirituous and fermented liquors, notwithstanding 
that they are confessedly commercial articles — can 
rest only on some proposition in science or morals 
of corresponding sweep. And, although our legis- 
lation is not entirely consistent in its details with 
any theory, yet it does in fact rest on a theory 
which involves these two positions, viz.: The 
essentially poisonous character of alcoholic bever- 
ages, and The immorality of their use. It assumes 
that any law which permits (and regulates) their 
sale is " immoral and an educator of immorality." * 

I. 

The advocates of Prohibition base their argument 
in part upon the assumption that alcohol is a poi- 
son, in the sense in which strychnine or arsenic is 
poison, to be administered to the human system only 

* Minority Report of 1866, House Document 359, p. 33. 



12 

under the restrictions applicable to the administra- 
tion of fatal drugs. 

They affirm this of alcohol taken in whatever 
doses, averring, as it has been concisely expressed 
by another, " that whatever is true of the excessive 
use of alcohol is true also in proportionate degree 
of the moderate and occasional useP Dr. Car- 
penter, Registrar of the University of London, and 
the leading scientific authority with the advocates 
of prohibition, declares in set terms that w The 
action of Alcohol upon the animal body in health 
is essentially poisonous. 17 

Let us therefore at the outset investigate this 
assumption that alcohol is necessarily a poison, 
with an eye to see, (in the language of Liebig 
concerning tea and coffee, substances akin to, 
though differing somewhat from, alcohol in their 
working on the human frame,) w whether it depend 
on sensual and sinful inclinations merely that every 
people of the globe has appropriated some such 
means of acting on the nervous life." * 

Twenty years ago alimentary substances were 
classified by Liebig as Eespiratory Food, and as 
Plastic Food, the line of distinction between them, 
in composition, being the absence or presence of 

* Liebig's Letters on Chemistry, 3d London edition, p. 456. 



13 



• 



nitrogen, and the line of distinction between them 
in their transformation in the human body, being 
according to Liebig's theory, that though both are 
burned by the inhaled oxygen, yet the former is 
burned directly by it, without previous transforma- 
tion into the human tissues, while part of the lat- 
ter, before final consumption, becomes human 
tissue. 

Concisely stated, Liebig's two classes of food 
are, therefore, 

I. Certain non-azotized substances, which, from 
their large amount of carbon, serve (as fuel,) to 
keep up the animal heat, and which he names the 
elements of respiration. 

II. Certain nitrogenized substances, which are 
adapted to the formation of blood, (out of that, 
muscle, and the tissues,) and which he terms the 
plastic elements of nutrition. 

Liebig's theory of combustion or oxidation, and 
the sharpness of his distinction between his classes, 
have been modified by recent scientific disputants ; 
but his position that alcoholic beverages taken in 
fit combinations, and in due moderation, perform 
the functions of food, remains unshaken. 



14 

He says, — 

" Besides fat and those substances which contain carbon 
and the elements of water, man consumes, in the shape of 
the alcohol of fermented liquors, another substance, which 
in his body, plays exactly the same part as the non-nitrogen- 
ized constituents of food. 

" The alcohol, taken in the form of wine or any other 
similar beverage, disappears in the body of man. Although 
the elements of alcohol do not possess by themselves the 
property of combining with oxygen at the temperature of 
the body, and forming carbonic acid and water, yet alcohol 
acquires, by contact with bodies in the condition of erema- 
causis or absorption of oxygen, such as are invariably pres- 
ent in the body, this property to a far higher degree than is 
known to occur in the case of fat and other non-nitrogenized 
substances." * 

Not only have many physiologists and chemists 
adopted this general theory, but even those others, 
who modify the theory of Liebig as stated by 
himself, nevertheless classify alcoholic drinks in 
the category of foods. f 

* Animal Chemistry, 3d edition: London, pp. 97, 98. 

f See, among other authorities, Clinical Medicine, by W. T. Gairdner, 
Physician to the Eoyal Infirmary of Edinburgh, and Lecturer on the 
Practice of Medicine ; and Human Physiology, Statical and Dynamical ; 
or, the Conditions and Course of the Life of Man, by Prof. John W. 
Draper, pp. 27, 28. 

See, also, the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, for January 31, 
1867, which contains a brief account of Dr. Frankland's deductions from 
his own experiments and those of Professors Fick and Wislicenus, con- 
cerning the capacity of non-azotized food to supply power and repair 
waste. 



15 

In the result which we shall reach concerning 
alcohol, it makes no practical difference whether 
Liebig's division of food stands or falls. If alco- 
hol be food, it matters not to the question of a 
Prohibitory Law, whether it be Respiratory Food 
or Plastic Food. 

Dr. Carpenter himself, admits alcohol, in one 
work,* into the category of foods, classifying it 
with the oleaginous group of foods, although in 
another work,f denouncing it as poison. As Mr. 
Lewes tersely says of him on just this point: — 
" We have only to disentangle his confusion and 
we find him an ally." 

Alcohol contains the carbon and hydrogen which 
belong to the normal elements of the body, and 
common experience in all wine-growing and beer- 
drinking countries, and the experience of invalids 
and convalescents everywhere, who are often sup- 
ported almost entirely on alcoholic fluids, show 
that they are assimilated. Therefore (though not 
proper, undiluted, any more than saltpetre, or 
oxygen are good food by themselves,) it is capable 
of acting, and does act, in certain beverages, as a 
food. 

* Human Physiology, p. 475. 

f Physiology of Temperance and Total Abstinence. 



16 

That light wines, ale, beer and cider act (when 
moderately used,) as a poison, is contradicted also 
by common experience, by examples like the life- 
long practice of Cornaro, and the testimony of 
entire nations and successive ages. 

Cornaro from his fortieth year to his death, 
restricted himself to a daily allowance of twelve 
ounces of solid food and fourteen ounces of wine. 
Of him Dr. Carpenter writes:* — 

w The smallest quantity of food upon which life 
is known to have been supported with vigor during 
a prolonged period, is that on which Cornaro states 
himself to have subsisted. This was no more than 
twelve ounces a day chiefly of vegetable matter, 
with fourteen ounces of light wine, for a period of 
fifty-eight years." Born at Yenice in 1467, he 
died at Padua in 1566. 

Commenting upon this statement by Dr. Car- 
penter, Mr. George Henry Lewes, (author of the 
Physiology of Common Life,) saysrf — "Observe 
the proportion of wine in this diet, and then ask 
how it is in the face of such facts, that Dr. Car- 
penter can deny the nutritive value of alcohol." 

Concerning wine Liebig says : — \ 

* Human Physiology, p. 387. 

f Westminster Review, No. cxxv., July, 1355. 

% Letters on Chemistry, 3d London edition, p. 454. 



17 

•"As a restorative, a means of refreshment when the 
powers of life are exhausted, of giving animation and energy 
where man has to struggle with days of sorrow, as a means 
of correction and compensation where misproportion occurs 
in nutrition, wine is surpassed by no product of nature or of 
art. * * * In no part of Germany do the apothecaries' 
establishments bring so low a price as in the rich cities on 
the Rhine ; for there wine is the universal medicine of the 
healthy as well as the sick. It is considered as milk for the 
aged." 

Pereira writes as follows concerning beer: — 

" Considered dietetically, beer possesses a threefold prop- 
erty ; it quenches thirst ; it stimulates, cheers, and if taken 
in sufficient quantity, intoxicates ; lastly, it nourishes or 
strengthens. * * * Beer proves a refreshing and salubrious 
drink (if taken in moderation,) and an agreeable and valu- 
able stimulus and support to those who have to undergo 
much bodily fatigue. " 

In the article " Diet," in Chambers's Encyclopae- 
dia,* the writer says : — 

" The laboring man, who can hardly find bread and meat 
enough to preserve the balance between the formation and 
decay of his tissues, finds in alcohol an agent which, if 
taken in moderation, enables him, without disturbing his 
health, to dispense with a certain quantity of food, and yet 
keeps up the weight and strength of his body." 

* Chambers's Encyclopaedia, Vol. iii., p. 552. Art. Diet. See also the 
Anatomy of Drunkenness, by Dr. Macnish, p. 225. 
3 



18 

Nay, at the close of Dr. Carpenter's work on 
the Physiology of Temperance and Total Absti- 
nence, — a work which is the scientific manual of 
the Prohibitionists, — occurs the following passage. 
He is arguing upon a thesis which he expresses as 
follows, viz. : that " whilst the habitual use of alco- 
holic liquors, even in the most moderate amount, is 
likely, (except in a few rare cases,) to be injurious, 
great benefit may be derived in the treatment of 
disease, from the medicinal use of alcohol in appro- 
priate cases." And he comes finally to speak of 
"a class of individuals, who," he says, "can 
scarcely be regarded as subjects of disease, but in 
whom the conditions are essentially different from 
those of health." " These are such," he contin- 
ues, " as, from constitutional debility, or early hab- 
its, or some other cause that does not admit of 
rectification, labor under an habitual deficiency of 
appetite and digestive power, even when they are 
living under circumstances generally most favora- 
ble to vigor, and when there is no indication of dis- 
ordered action in any organ, all that is needed being 
a slight increase in the capacity for preparing the 
aliment which the body really needs. Experience 
affords ample evidence that there are such cases, 
especially among those engaged in avocations which 



19 

involve a good deal of mental activity; and that, 
with the assistance of a small but habitual allow- 
ance of alcoholic stimulants, a long life of active 
exertion may be sustained, whilst the vital powers 
would speedily fail 'without their aid, not for the 
want of direct support from them, but for the want 
of the measure of food which the system really 
needs, and which no other means seems so effectual 
in enabling it to appropriate. * * * To withhold 
the assistance of alcoholic stimulants, (it is in their 
very mildest form, such as that of bitter ale, that 
they are most beneficial,) would often be to con- 
demn the individuals in question to a life-long 
debility, incapacitating them from all activity of 
exertion in behalf of themselves or others, and ren- 
dering them susceptible to a variety of other causes 
of disease. For it seems to be the peculiar charac- 
ter of this condition, that no other medicine can 
supply what is wanting, with the same effect as a 
small quantity of an alcoholic beverage, taken with 
the principal meal of the day." 

This extract, from Carpenter, leads us to consider 
now, what is a stimulant? It is often alleged against, 
alcohol that it is stimulating; that it is even more 
stimulating than almost any other substance in ordi- 
nary use for diet. But what is a stimulant? Is a 



20 

substance intrinsically deleterious for diet because 
it is stimulating? Is it justly a reproach to a man 
that he uses stimulants? Let us not be deceived 
by words. Let us probe this question. And first, 
for a brief, clear, sharp, incisive definition of the 
term "stimulant." This has been well expressed 
thus : — 

" Stimulants are only energetic stimufo*. Now all 
living acts require stimuli, — the eye light, the egg 
and seed heat or heat and moisture, the stomach 
food, sometimes condiments. It is hard to draw 
the line. Ninon de l'Enclos said her soup made 
her tipsy, and convalescents have been said to get 
drunk on a beefsteak. That which is a stimuZ^s to 
one person is a stimulant to another. The last term 
means only a more concentrated form of stimulus, 
or one which acts more vigorously than ordinary 
stimuli, for any reason in itself or in the person." 

Mr. Lewes, in the " Westminster Review," * sums 
up the question concerning alcohol as a stimulant, 
as follows : — 

* Westminster Keview, No. cxxv., July, 1855, American edition pp. 59, 
60. See also the Intellectual Development of Europe, p. 577, by Prof. 
John W. Draper, concerning the use of food by animals j for the force it 
contains. Also the able paper by Dr. Edward Smith, On the Actions of 
Alcohols, printed with the Transactions of the National Association for the 
Promotion of Social Science. London, 1860. 



21 

" Life is only possible under incessant stimulus. Organic 
processes depend on incessant change, and this change is 
dependent on stimuli. The stimulus of food, the stimulus 
of fresh air, the stimulus of exercise, are called natural, ben- 
eficial ; the stimulus of alcohol seems selected for special 
reprobation without cause being shown, except that people 
choose to say it is not natural. How not natural ? The 
phrase can have two significations, and it can have but two : 
first, that alcohol is not a stimulus which man employs in a 
state of nature ; second, it is not consonant with the nature 
of his organism. The second is a pure begging of the ques- 
tion ; and the first is in flat contradiction with experience. 
* * * No nation known to us has ever passed- into the inven- 
tive condition of even rudimentary civilization without dis- 
covering, and, having discovered, without largely indulging 
in, the stimulus of alcohol. Man discovers fermentation as 
he discovers the tea-plant and the coffee-plant. 

" Of two things, one ; either we must condemn all stimu- 
lus, and alcohol, because it is a stimulus ; or we must prove 
that there is some-thing peculiar in the alcoholic stimulus 
which demarcates it from all others. Here, again, the reader 
sees the question narrowed and brought within an arena of 
precise debate. Only two positions are possible ; indeed, we 
may say, only one ; for who is mad enough to condemn all 
stimulus ? The ground thus cleared, the fight narrowed to 
this one point, let us do justice to the strength of our antag- 
onist ; let us confess at once that there is a peculiarity in 
alcohol which justifies in some degree its bad reputation, a 
peculiarity upon which all the mischief of intoxication de- 
pends ; one which causes all the miseries so feelingly laid to 
its door. And what is this peculiarity ? Nothing less than 
the fascination of its virtue, the potency of its effect ; were 



22 

it less alluring, it would not lure to excess ; were it less 
potent, it would not leap into such flames of fiery exaltation." 

Prof. J. F. W. Johnson, in his Chemistry of Com- 
mon Life, 45 " one of the most useful works of that 
distinguished chemist, says: — 

" It is ascertained of ardent spirits, First. That they 
directly warm the body, and, by the changes they undergo 
in the blood, supply a portion of that carbonic acid and 
watery vapor which, as a necessity of life, are constantly 
being given off by the lungs. They so far, therefore, supply 
the place of food — of the fat and starch for example — : which 
we usually eat. Hence a schnapps, in Germany, with a 
slice of lean dried meat, make a mixture like that of the 
starch and gluten in our bread, which is capable of feeding 
the body. So we either add sugar to milk, or take spirits 
along with it, (old man's milk,) for the purpose of adjusting 
the proportions of the ingredients more suitably to the con- 
stitution, or to the circumstances in which it is to be 
consumed. 

" Second. That they diminish the absolute amount of 
matter usually given off by the lungs and the kidneys. 
They thus lessen, as tea and coffee do, the natural waste of 
the fat and tissues, and they necessarily diminish in an equal 
degree the quantity of ordinary food which is necessary to 
keep up the weight of the body. In other words, they have 
the property of making a given weight of food go further 
in sustaining the strength and bulk of the body. And, in 
addition to the saving of material thus effected, they ease and 

* Vol. i., p. 349. 



23 

lighten the labor of the digestive organs, which, when the 
stomach is weak, is often a most valuable result. 

" Hence fermented liquors, if otherwise suitable to the 
constitution > exercise a beneficial influence upon old people, 
and other weakly persons whose fat and tissues have begun 
to waste. * * * This lessening in weight or substance is 
one of the most usual consequences of the approach of old 
age. It is a common symptom of the decline of life. * * * 
Weak alcoholic drinks arrest or retard, and thus diminish 
the daily amount of this loss of substance. * * * Hence 
poets have called wine ' the milk of the old,' and scientific 
philosophy owns the propriety of the term. If it does not 
nourish the old so directly as milk nourishes the young, 
yet it certainly does aid in supporting and filling up their 
failing frames. And it is one of the happy consequences of 
a temperate youth and manhood, that this spirituous milk 
does not fail in its good effects when the weight of years 
begins to press upon us." 

And now, with especial reference to alcohol both 
as food and as stimulus, the latest, and certainly one 
of the ablest, scientific authorities, is the recent 
work on " Stimulants and Narcotics " by Dr. 
Francis E. Anstie, lecturer on Materia Medica and 
Therapeutics, and formerly on Toxicology, at 
"Westminster. 

Dr. Anstie says : — 

" If anything deserves the name of a food, assuredly 
oxygen does, for it is the most necessary element in every 
process of life. It is highly suggestive, then, to find that 



24 



that very same quiet and perfect action of the vital functions, 
without undue waste, without hurry, without pain, without 
excessive material growth, is precisely what we produce, 
when we produce any useful effect, by the administration 
of stimulants, though, as might be expected, our artificial 
means are weak and uncertain in their operation, compared 
with the great natural stimulus of life." (p. 145.) 

" A stimulus promotes or restores some natural action, and 
is no more liable to be followed by morbid depression than 
is the revivifying influence of food. And if it be sought to 
distinguish foods by the peculiar characteristic of being 
transformed in the body, then I answer that this is the worst 
definition of food that can be given, since water, which is not 
transformed in the body at all, is nevertheless, the most 
necessary element of nutrition, seeing that human life can- 
not only not be maintained without it, but may subsist for 
weeks on water as its only pabulum besides the atmosphere 
and tissues." (p. 149.) 

" Alcohol taken alone or with the addition alone of small 
quantities of water, will prolong life greatly beyond the 
period at which it must cease if no nourishment or water 
only had been given ; that in acute diseases it has repeat- 
edly supported not only life, but even the bulk of the body 
during many days of abstinence from common foods ; and 
that, in a few instances persons have supported themselves 
almost solely on alcohol and inconsiderable quantities of 
water for years P 

" We may be at a loss to explain the chemistry of its action 
on the body, but we may safely say that it acts as a food." 
(p. 138.) 

" Another grand argument against the propriety of com- 
paring stimulants with true foods has always been that 



25 

stimulus is invariably followed by reaction. * * * It is not 
true that stimulus is of itself provocative of subsequent 
depression ; but there are circumstances in which this might 
easily appear to be the case. For instance, when the super- 
abundant mental energy of a man whose physical frame is 
weak, induces him to make violent and continued physical 
efforts, he is apt to find, at the end of a short ' spurt' of 
exertion, that his energy is • exhausted. But here the 
exhaustion is no recoil from a state of stimulation. * * * 
And the case of drunkenness, that is, of alcoholic narcotism — 
affords another excellent example of the fallacy we are con- 
sidering. The narcotic dose of alcohol, * * * is alone 
responsible for the symptoms of depressive reaction. Had 
a merely stimulant dose been administered, no depression 
would have occurred, any more than depression results from 
such a gentle stimulus of the muscular system as is implied 
in a healthy man taking a walk of three or four miles. 
What depression is there, as an after consequence, of a glass 
or two of wine taken at dinner, or of a glass of beer taken 
at lunch, by a healthy man ? What reaction from a tea- 
spoonful of sal-volatile swallowed by a person who feels 
somewhat faint? What recoil from the stimulus of heat, 
applied in a hot bath, or of oxygen administered by Mar- 
shall Hall's process, to a half-drowned man ? Absolutely 
none whatever." (pp. 146-7.) 

Doctor Brinton* says in his Treatise on Food 
and Digestion: — 

"From good wine, in moderate quantities, there is no 
reaction whatever. * * * That teetotalism is com- 

* Treatise on Food and Digestion, by William Brinton, M. D., F. R. S., 
Physician to St. Thomas' Hospital. (English.) 
4 



26 

patible with health, it needs no elaborate facts to establish ; 
but if we take the customary life of those constituting the 
masses of our inhabitants of towns, we shall find reason to 
wait before we assume that this result will extend to our 
population at large. And, in respect to experience, it is 
singular how few healthy teetotallers are to be met with in 
our ordinary inhabitants of cities. Glancing back over the 
many years during which this question has been forced upon 
the author by his professional duties, he may estimate that 
he has sedulously examined not less than 50,000 to 70,000 
persons, including many thousands in perfect health. Wish- 
ing, and even expecting to find it otherwise, he is obliged to 
confess that he has hitherto met with but very few perfectly 
healthy middle-aged persons, successfully pursuing any 
arduous metropolitan calling under teetotal habits. On the 
other hand, he has known many total abstainers, whose 
apparently sound constitutions have given way with unusual 
and frightful rapidity when attacked by a casual sickness." 

The emphasis of this opinion will be more fully 
appreciated, if one will but examine Dr. Brin- 
ton's book w On Diseases of the Stomach," which 
exhibits him in a most cautious and conservative 
light, in the remedial prescription of alcoholic 
drinks. 

I come now very briefly to consider certain 
recent experiments upon which the prohibitionists 
mainly rely, to control the scientific opinions to 
which I have already alluded. I mean those of 
MM. Lallemand, Perrin, and Duroy. These inge- 



27 

nious French chemists, after a series of original 
experiments, supposed themselves to have proved 
that " alcohol is eliminated from the organism in 
totality and in nature" and that it K is never trans- 
formed, never destroyed in the organism." Their 
conclusion therefore, is, that w alcohol is not food" 
as a scientific proposition, although as matter of 
practice they do go for light wines. In a pamphlet 
entitled "Is Alcohol Food or Physic," which I 
bought at the rooms of the " Temperance Alliance " 
in Boston, in which these gentlemen are upheld as 
supposed destroyers of the theory of which Liebig 
may be termed the father, I find that their experi- 
ments are contrasted favorably with others, because 
they were made on an empty stomach; and that, 
these French experiments are confessedly patho- 
logical, rather than dietetic. The argument drawn 
from them, assumes, in great part, that inferences 
can be fairly drawn from effects produced by 
narcotic, or poisonous doses, (as for instance, the 
case of a man who died thirty-two hours after 
drinking a pint of brandy,) to the case of a person, 
using with temperance as a part of his meal, and 
in due proportion with other food, an article of 
mild drink in which it is combined. The same 
reasoning would in like manner, justify the argu- 



28 

ment that, because a decoction of green tea, of a 
given strength, will siirely cause death, therefore a 
cup of weak tea taken with supper, — containing as 
it does, a portion of theine, the characteristic prin- 
ciple of tea, — is a deleterious drink, and propor- 
tionally poisonous. It also overlooks the mysteri- 
ous subtleties of animal life, and those, still more 
mysterious and elusive, which connect the moral 
with the animal economy. It fails to observe the 
existence of a vital chemistry, some of the phe- 
nomena of which are observable, but whose laws 
thus far defy our capacity for logical definition. It 
even overlooks the varying action of the different 
alcoholic drinks, disclosed in the experiments of 
Dr. Edward Smith; for example, brandy and gin 
lessening the quantity of carbonic acid evolved in 
respiration, while it was increased, on the other 
hand, by the use of ale, and by the use of rum. 

Animal chemistry is in its infancy. The positive 
knowledge on the points undertaken to be so dog- 
matically affirmed, on the strength of those recent 
French experiments, is relatively little; and men of 
science do not concur with their deductions. 

Dr. Anstie, after having discussed and examined 
the many experiments both of Smith and of Lalle- 
mand and his friends, nevertheless declares, in view 



29 

of their facts and those disclosed by the experiments 
of himself and of Baudot and others, his non-concur- 
rence with the Lallemand theory; and, (comparing 
it with sether and chloroform,) he says of alcohol 
that it seems as if it "was intended to be the medi- 
cine of those ailments which are engendered of the 
necessary every day evils of civilized life, and has 
therefore been made attractive to the senses, and 
easily retained in the tissues, and in various ways 
approving itself to our judgment as a food; while 
the others, which are more rarely needed for their 
stimulant properties, and are chiefly valuable for 
their beneficent temporary poisonous action, by the 
help of which painful operations are sustained with 
impunity, are in a great measure deprived of these 
attractions, and of their facilities for entering and 
remaining in the system." * 

One of the most able English scientific critics of 
these French experiments further says :f 

" Dr. Brinton, [in his work on Food and Digestion,] who 
is by no means unreasonably prejudiced in favor of alcohol, 
has given it as the result of his very large experience, that 
persons who abstain altogether from alcohol, break down, 
almost invariably, after a certain number of years, if they 

* Stimulants and Narcotics, p. 401. 

t Cornhill Magazine, No. 33, September, 1862. Art., Does Alcohol act 
as a Food ? n. 329. 



30 

are constantly employed in any severe intellectual or phys- 
ical labor. Either their minds or their bodies give way 
suddenly, and the mischief once done is very hard to repair. 
This is quite in accordance with what I have myself observed, 
and with what I can gather from other medical men: and 
it speaks volumes concerning the way in which we ought to 
regard alcohol. If, indeed, it be a fact, that in a certain 
high state of civilization men require to take alcohol every 
day, in some shape or other, under penalty of breaking 
down prematurely in their work, it is idle to appeal to a set 
of imperfect chemical or physiological experiments, and to 
decide, on their evidence, that we ought to call alcohol a 
medicine or a poison, but not a food. In the name of com- 
mon sense, why should we retain these ridiculous distinc- 
tions for any other purpose than to avoid catastrophes ? . If 
it be well understood that a glass of good wine will relieve 
a man's depression and fatigue sufficiently to enable him to 
digest his dinner, and that a pint of gin taken at once will 
probably kill him stone dead, why haggle about words ? On 
the part of the medical profession, I think I may say that 
we have long since begun to believe that those medicines 
which really do benefit our patients act in one way or 
another as foods, and that some of the most decidedly poi- 
sonous substances are those which offer, in the form of small 
doses, the strongest example of a true food action ? 

" On the part of alcohol, then, I venture to claim that 
though we all acknowledge it to be a poison, if taken during 
health in any but quite restricted doses, it is also a most 
valuable medicine-food. I am obliged to declare that the 
chemical evidence is as yet insufficient to give any complete 
explanation of its exact manner of action upon the system ; 
but that the practical facts are as striking as they could well 



31 

be, and that there can be no mistake about them. And I 
have thought it proper that, while highly-colored statements 
of the results of the new French researches are being some- 
what disingenuously placed before the lay public, there 
should not be a total silence- on the part of those members 
of the profession who do not see themselves called upon to 
yield to the mere force of agitation. " 

And just a dozen years ago, Dr. James Jackson, 
the venerable, beloved and most eminent Nestor 
of the medical profession in America, bore this 
public testimony concerning the medicinal employ- 
ment of spirits and wines : — 

" 1 would never order them to one whom I suspected to 
be deficient in prudence and self-control. But, keeping 
these things in mind, 1 have often directed the use even of 
brandy. In doing this, I have been in the habit of saying 
to the patient, ' If I ever hear of your indulging to excess 
in the use of this, or any similar article, I will call on you 
and exhort you to stop.' In one instance, and only one in 
the course of a long life, have I been called upon to redeem 
my pledge. This was in the case of a worthy lady, some 
twenty years after I had directed the measured use of 
brandy. At my request, s^he immediately gave up the use 
of all spirituous and fermented liquors, and I have reason 
to believe that she never resumed them. I do not, then, 
call the risk very great of such prescriptions, when made 
with proper caution. In regard to the benefit, in some 
cases of dyspepsia, and in various other cases, I have not 
any doubt. And, that I may tell the whole, let me say, that 



32 



I have repeatedly seen very great benefit from giving wine 
to young children. The benefit has been particularly 
marked in some children struggling feebly through the 
period of dentition, and I can name some to whom I had 
made this prescription more than forty years ago, among 
whom not one has shown any peculiar fondness for wine in 
subsequent years. I exhort all young people in health not 
to adopt the practice of drinking wine. I deprecate every- 
thing which shall tend to intemperance, and I believe that 
many men suffer from the use of wine and spirits, even in 
a moderate way. But I love to tell the truth, even when it 
is unfashionable. I believe that very many persons are 
benefited by the juice of the grape, and I choose to say so. 
Moreover, I believe that persons disposed to intemperance 
are not to be restrained from indulging their vicious 
propensity, by the abstinence of their more prudent 
neighbors." * 

Professor Gairdner, of Edinburgh — while wholly 
opposing the theory of retarding the metamorpho- 
sis of tissue as a desirable end, and while admitting 
that to the perfect ideal man, living in the enjoy- 
ment of all natural and wholesome vital stimuli, 
amid perfect hygienic conditions, such liquors are 
probably worse than superfluous — declares his 
desire to leave all the physiological abstractions, 

* Letters to a Young Physician just entering upon Practice, by Dr. 
James Jackson, M. D., LL.D., Professor Emeritus of the Theory and 
Practice of Physic in the University of Cambridge, late Physician Massa- 
chusetts General Hospital, Honorary Member of the Medico- Chirurgical 
Society of London, Corresponding Member of the Academy of Medicine 
at Paris, &c, &c, &c. 



33 

and to take his stand on the great broad series of 
recognized facts, which prove their relieving, reviv- 
ing and supporting power under difficulties and 
in emergencies; claiming the right of reason to 
discriminate between their use and abuse. In that 
spirit he quotes in his work on w Clinical Medicine " 
this paragraph, from the w Letters to a Young Phy- 
sician," calling it " the ivhole matter in a nutshell." 

!Not content with my own unlearned reflections, 
nor even to leave the matter with Dr. Anstie, I 
called the subject as it is presented by Lallemand, 
to the attention of Dr. James C. White, the learned 
assistant-professor of chemistry in Harvard College. 
The report made by that gentleman, confirms the 
belief, in which Anstie had also concurred, that 
some alcohol is eliminated unchanged through the 
channels indicated by Lallemand and his friends; 
thus establishing an error in the previously held 
theory that, with the exception of a small amount 
which escaped by the lungs during expiration, this 
substance was entirely consumed within the organ- 
ism. But he affirms that these experiments in no 
way prove that alcohol is eliminated in totality from 
the system; for the experiments on which that con- 
clusion is based, furnish the strongest possible evi- 
dence of its unwarrantableness. The very experi- 



34 

ments on which alone they rest the conclusion that 
all which is taken into the animal economy escapes 
again unchanged, fail to discover any but a very 
small percentage discharged through the various 
channels of elimination. Yet the assertion is, that 
all has been thus eliminated; while if anything is 
proved at all, it is proved that alcohol is nearly all 
consumed within the organism, and that a very 
small percentage escapes unchanged. But it should 
be remembered that an excessive quantity of either 
salt or sugar being taken into the system, the 
excess is disposed of in the same way. 

Of the proposition that " alcohol is never trans- 
formed, never destroyed" in the organism, Dr. 
"White reports thus : — 

" Former investigators had come to the conclusion that 
alcohol was converted into aldehyde and acetic acid, pro- 
gressive products of oxygenation of alcohol, which in turn 
underwent further transformation, and that it finally escaped 
as carbonic acid and water. Lallemand, &c, examined the 
blood, after the use of alcohol, and failed to find either alde- 
hyde or acetic acid, and on this negative evidence alone is 
based the sweeping conclusion. Even if we admit the cor- 
rectness and fairness of their results which were obtained by 
experiments performed at too early a period to be completely 
satisfactory, and which are met by those of Bouchardet, they 
in no way invalidate the theory of the transformation of 
alcohol in the organism. We know too little of the many 



35 

and complex changes which organic substances undergo 
within the economy, to speak in such positive terms. Those 
conclusions may or may not be adopted as to the conversion 
of alcohol into aldehyde and acetic acid ; they certainly in 
no way settle the question as to its transformation or destruc- 
tion in the system" 

But, besides these proofs, you have in evidence 
before you the testimony of Dr. White in person, 
of Dr. Edward H. Clarke, Professor of Materia 
Medica, of Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Professor 
of Anatomy and Physiology, of Dr. Henry J. 
Bigelow, Professor of Surgery, of Dr. J. B. S. 
Jackson, Professor of Morbid Anatomy and Path- 
ology, and of Dr. D. Humphreys Storer, Professor 
of Obstetrics, (all in the Medical School of Har- 
vard College;) of Dr. Charles T. Jackson and 
Professor E. "N. Horsford, both eminent in chem- 
istry and other branches of natural science. Those 
gentlemen constitute an array of experts in the 
sciences of chemistry, physiology and medicine, 
who are recognized as authority in the other hem- 
isphere, as well as in our own. With their testi- 
mony before the Committee, forming a part of the 
printed record of its investigations, I need only 
allude to it without recital. I hold, that the opin- 
ions of these gentlemen, aided also by that of Pro- 



36 

fessor Agassiz, who testified to the fact of the use 
of wine, with manifestly happy effects, in the actual 
alimentation of European peoples, have for all the 
purposes of legislative inquiry established the diet- 
etic uses of alcoholic beverages, when employed in 
moderation, and properly combined in the construc- 
tion of diet. Their opinions again are re-inforced 
by the recent physiological experiments tried with 
ingenious variety in his own person, by Dr. Ham- 
mond, lately surgeon-general of the army of the 
United States, and the conclusions arrived at by 
that eminent physiologist.* 

It does not follow, that because an old man, or 
an ill-fed man, or an overtasked man, or an invalid, 
may find alcoholic beverages useful, they are not 
useless or hurtful to others. It does not follow, 
that because they are good for some at sometimes, 
they are good for all or at all times. Nor, on the 
other hand, does it follow, because in their excess 
and misapplication, they are indescribably bad, that, 
"with bell, book and candle," they should be 
solemnly cursed by the General Court. 

This review of the assumption that, because 
alcohol taken in excess is injurious, it is therefore 

* See Hammond's " Physiological Memoirs," Philadelphia, 1863. 



37 

alivays ajpoison, will be soon ended. ' The statement 
of the proposition would seem to exhibit its fallacy, 
for it is arguing from abuse to use, and it is deny- 
ing that difference in quantity can produce differ- 
ence in quality. 

The assertion is that, because alcohol taken into 
the system in certain quantities acts as a poison, it 
is therefore in all quantities and dilutions a poison. 
Let us examine it in the light of familiar illustra- 
tions.' Omitting for the moment facts in evidence 
pertaining to alcohol itself, we have analogy per- 
fect and to the point, in atmospheric air. 

Atmospheric air is composed of, by weight, 23.01 
of oxygen, and 76.99 of nitrogen. Each of the 
constituents of the air is essential to the present 
order of things. Oxygen is pre-eminently its 
active element. Duly to restrain this activity the 
oxygen is diluted and weakened by three times its 
bulk of the negative element — nitrogen. Their 
properties are thus perfectly adjusted to the require- 
ments of the living world. "Were the atmosphere 
wholly composed of nitrogen, life could never have 
been possible ; were it to consist wholly of oxygen, 
other conditions remaining as they are, the world 
would run through its career with fearful rapidity; 
combustion, once excited, would proceed with 



38 

ungovernable violence; animals would live with 
hundred-fold intensity, and perish in a few hours. 

To infer from the effects of a large quantity to 
those of a less, is thus contrary to sound observa- 
tion. Oxygen, pure, is a poison, — that is, we should 
die in it. Dilute it with three-fourths of nitrogen, 
and it becomes the air we breathe and by which all 
life is supported. 

Saltpetre kills a man in doses of one ounce or 
upward. Eight ounces dissolved in a pint of water 
killed a horse. Two or three drachms only, will 
kill a dog. Nay, this very nitre or saltpetre may 
easily be a remediless poison. 

"In acute rheumatism it is sometimes administered in 
doses repeated at intervals to the extent of two ounces in 
twenty-four hours ; though one-half ounce in concentrated 
solution causes heat and pain in the stomach which may he 
followed with convulsions and death. When taken in 
poisonous quantities there is no antidote knownP* 

Yet, saltpetre is used without fear of evil conse- 
quences in the curing of hams and other meats. 
Shall we say that a sandwich is' poisonous and 
should be prohibited by law? 

* New American Cyclopaedia, Vol. xii., p. 377. Art. Nitre. 



39 

"With one more quotation from the able pen of 
Mr. Lewes, I dismiss this fallacy from further 
argument: — 

" When people say ' Oh, this is only a question of degree,' 
they forget how frequently questions of degree involve ques- 
tions of kind. Ice and steam differ only in the degree of 
heat ; the cold of the Arctics and the heat of the Tropics are 
but differences of degree. 

" Iron in a mass exposed to the air, burns, but burns so 
slowly that we call it rust; the same iron in a state of 
extreme subdivision ignites when exposed to the air. Here 
we have only differences of degree, yet if an inflammable, 
substance be near the ignited powder, it will also ignite, 
whereas the same substance might remain forever close by 
the rusting iron and never be affected. If this be true in 
cases so simple, how much more should we expect to find it 
in cases so complex as those of organic processes where 
minute variations ramify into vast and unforeseen results ! 

" The argument from excess is worthless. It only meets 
teases of excess. Oxygen is as terrible a poison as- strych- 
nine, if in excess. Heat, so indispensable to the organism, is 
obliged to be reduced to moderate quantities before the organ- 
ism can endure it. Light, which is the necessary stimulus 
to the eye, produces blindness, in excess ; mutton-chops 
have, when taken in moderation, a nutritive value which no 
Briton is bold enough to question, * * * yet mutton-chops 
taken in excess kill with the certainty of arsenic, for over- 
nutrition is fatal." 



40 

And now, in concluding nry remarks upon what I 
have termed the scientific view of the question, I 
repeat, in the words of Mr. Lewes :— 

" Let no advocate of temperance misconstrue the 
present [argument.] We rescue a scientific ques- 
tion, we do not oppose the moral principles of the 
movement. That drunkenness is one of the most 
terrible sources of demoralization, and that tem- 
perance, both physically and morally, is one of the 
cardinal virtues most needing inculcation, no rea- 
sonable being doubts. Equally indisputable is it 
that any movement which can effect a reform in the 
tendency to drunkenness, deserves the heartiest 
support. Nor are we surprised at the exaggera- 
tions and errors which such a movement employs 
as instruments to effect its purpose. * * * Our 
purpose, then, be it understood, is not to cast a 
stone of obstruction in the path of the temperance 
movement, but to argue a scientific question." 

This much, at all events, is clear, viz. : That the 
Legislature of Massachusetts has no knoivledge, and 
has no means of knowing, that the classification, 
(so commonly and so authoritatively made,) by 
which alcohol, as found in certain drinks, is included 
in the category of foods, is not connect. If that 
classification is correct, then there is an end of the 



41 

controversy. For then it cannot be held that the 
government ought to prohibit the citizen from 
making up his own bill of fare for himself; though 
he can be held accountable for his evil conduct 
affecting others, proceeding from his abusing this 
liberty. But those who insist on the existing 
statute of prohibition, in spite of the fact that those 
drinks are foods, or that they may be such, and 
that most masters of chemistry and physiology 
have so taught, and that the successive gener- 
ations of men have so believed, and that the 
most venerable exemplars of all human history 
have confirmed that belief by their own examples, 
and that a great portion of the people of Massa- 
chusetts think so now, and at least demand the 

r 

right of deciding the question for themselves, — 
those who thus insist, dare to propose to drive 
rough-shod over all respect for the convictions of 
their neighbors, and, assuming a theory entirely 
modern, (and at the best, uncertain arfd contro- 
verted,) to continue and to enforce the pains and 
the disgraces of the criminal law in its support. 
If the proposition, on which alone prohibition by 
the government can possibly stand, is true, let it be 
proved. I, certainly, for one, having meditated 
upon it, and observed upon it for years, have not 



42 

seen it established. I am entirely willing to find it 
true. And if it is true, I desire that its truth shall 
be made clear. But I want it established by 
methods fit to be pursued by free and rational men. 
I desire that every obstacle may be removed from 
the path of inquiry, and that the minds of all the 
people may be disabused of every just ground of 
prejudice, and be made hospitable and receptive. I 
know that wilfulness and violence, even under the 
forms of law, can only arouse contradiction and 
resentment. I know that, besides these, there will 
continue to be aroused an honest sense of personal 
injustice inflicted by the operation of statutes 
believed to be founded on incorrect notions, arbi- 
trarily insisted upon, and obstinately adhered to. 
While such relations last, there is no opportunity 
for men on either side to reach the best conclusions. 
The mere war of words is of itself always suffi- 
ciently disturbing. But, it seems an almost wanton 
disregard of the laws and the rights of the human 
mind, to complicate and distract, as the upholders 
of this law have done, the moral and intellectual 
issues which the whole subject involves. Grant 
that you have much reason to believe the proposi- 
tion of the Prohibitionists true, I submit that no 
honest man can yet declare that it is proved. 



43 

Nay — outside of the lists of controversy — where 
are the intelligent judges who are prepared to 
affirm that it enjoys even the preponderance of the 
proofs? 

I honor these scholars, whose testimony has been 
cited, for their ingenious pursuit of science. I 
should never fear that such men would draw 
extreme conclusions, nor insist on their premature 
adoption by others; for learning is modest. 

That alcohol can be easily fatal ; that it is hurtful 
always, — unless taken both in moderation, and 
under circumstances, and in compounds, and in 
combinations, adapted to the physical condition and 
the true needs of the individual, — there is no 
possible dispute. But that all the drinks into 
which it enters, are to be of course clietetically 
rejected, is not, thus far, the verdict. ISov does it 
yet apjDear that any experiments have settled the 
boundaries within which diet shall be kept. A 
physician once starved to death a duck, by feeding 
it solely on butter. It lived three weeks, and until 
the butter oozed through its skin and dropped from 
its feathers.* Yet butter is not a poison. "We 
know very well that a man could not maintain 



* Boussingault, — Chimie Agricole, p. 166 ; quoted in Treatise on 
Physiology, by Prof. John C. Dalton, p. 108. 



44 

health, nor even life, long, on water to drink and 
sugar to eat. Yet neither is a poison. Dr. Stark 
actually died in the experiment of trying to live on 
cheese. Yet everybody knows that cheese is a rich 
and nutritious food. The instances might be indefi- 
nitely multiplied of proofs in our common observa- 
tion, of the inability of single articles of acknowl- 
edged wholesome and nutritious solid food to 
maintain life and health, used singly and without 
variety. For example, how long would a man live 
in Havana, on pork only? How long would a 
healthy Greenlander subsist, amid his snows, on 
oranges? Or, how long could we, in Boston even, 
live on either ? The common experience of men 
certainly goes for something. INow the common 
experience of many nations and ages having 
assigned a place in the foods and medicines, to 
stimulating drinks of some kinds, into which alco- 
hol enters — the experiments of chemists and phys- 
iologists are pursued, when made in the interest of 
truth and pure science, with a view to detecting, 
identifying and comparing their modes of operation, 
and correcting the errors of inadvertence in com- 
mon life. And when the men of science have 
come to any substantial agreement, which calls on 
the civil state to interpose and alter the practice of 



45 

society, in order to conform it to the decrees of 

science, we shall learn it from the men of science 

themselves ; we shall not be called on by the 

unlearned to settle such disputes of the learned by 

an Act of the Legislature. 

"Within my own memory Dr. Sylvester Graham 

taught that no permanent cure for intemperance 

could be found, except in such changes of personal 

and social customs as would relieve the human 

» 

being of all desire for stimulants. He soon applied 
the idea to medicine, so that the prevention and 
cure of disease, as well as the remedy for intemper- 
ance, were found by him in the resort of all man- 
kind, without regard to age, climate or condition, 
to the use of water as the only beverage, and the 
eating of vegetables to the entire exclusion of 
animal food. And I confess that he seemed to 
prove it. His theories were ingenious, fortified by 
elaborate argument. They would have been very 
good, save that almost all the rest of mankind saw 
that they were not true. Even some of the very 
experiments on which he relied, contradict his too 
rash and dogmatical generalization. 



! A little learning is a dangerous thing : 
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring." 



47 

Had Graham convinced many, as for a time he 
did convince a few, then we might to-day have been 
arguing as a question of legislative prohibition, the 
case of Rhine wines and porter in company with 
that of mutton chops and beef steaks, all being 
included in the like condemnation. 



II. 

Leaving here, gentlemen, the argument on the 
assumption by the Prohibitionists that alcoholic 
beverages are essentially poisonous, I pass to the 
argument on their further assumption, that tlie use 
and the sale of alcoholic beverages are essentially 
immoral. 

The evils of this world are too great to render 
exaggeration any more consistent with wisdom 
than with truth. "What we need is courage, not 
cowardice, for the controversy against them. This 
world is a trying one to live in at all. But when 
its discipline is complete we shall go hence. After 
all, the moral dangers are within ourselves, not in 
the objects of nature. And social evils find their 
causes mainly in the falseness and disorder of the 
social economy. The savage ignorantly ascribes 
malign purposes and supernatural powers to things 



46 

sometimes the most inanimate and senseless. He 
sees them in some near relation, real or fancied, tg 
woes already endured or evils apprehended. He 
seeks to conciliate them by worship. And that we 
justly call superstition. But civilized man is not 
wholly unlike him. Sometimes, perceiving that in 
human society, in affairs, even in the uses of natural 
things, and in the operation of the passions native 
to the very constitution of the race, there are mani- 
fold abuses, he flees, disheartened and disgusted, 
from human society, abjures affairs, despises nature 
and all her loveliness, and contradicts and quarrels 
with all the intimations of nature within himself. 

It is only in the strife and actual controversy of 
life — natural, human and free — that robust virtue 
can be attained, or positive good accomplished. It 
is only in similar freedom alike from bondage and 
pupilage, alike from the prohibitions of artificial 
legislation on the one hand, and superstitious fears 
on the other, that nations or peoples can become 
thrifty, happy and great. Will you venture to 
adhere to the effete blunders of antiquated despot- 
isms, in the hope of serving, by legal force, the 
moral welfare of your posterity ? "Will you insist 
on the dogma that, even if certain gifts of nature 
or science are not poisons, they are nevertheless so 



48 

dangerously seductive that no virtue can be trusted 
to resist them ? But when society shall have 
intrusted the keeping of its virtue to the criminal 
laws, who will guaranty your success in the experi- 
ment, tried by so many nations and ages, resulting 
always in failure and defeat ? Do you exclaim, 
that the permitted sale of these beverages, fol- 
lowed as it must be by some use, must be followed, 
in turn, by some drunkenness; and that drunken- 
ness is not only the parent cause of nearly all our 
social woes, but that it is impossible to maintain 
against its ravages a successful moral war ? To 
both these propositions, moral philosophy, human 
experience, and history, all command a respectful 
dissent. 

Reason, experience and history all unite to prove 
that, while drunkenness lies in near relations with 
poverty and other miseries, and is very often their 
proximate cause, it is not true that it is the parent, 
or essential cause, without which they would not 
have been. And to the teachings of reason, expe- 
rience and history, are added the promises of Gospel 
Grace, enabling me in all boldness, to confront 
the fears of those who would rest the hopes of 
humanity on the commandments of men. 



49 

The evils of society, in our own' country and in 
the northern nations, have always tended to appear 
on the surface in the form of this sensual indul- 
gence. And yet, the essential evil has always been 
less deeply seated, while at the same time, the hope 
of social regeneration is brighter, within them, 
than among some other peoples, in whom the 
instinctive love of liberty is weaker, and among 
whom such indulgence is comparatively unknown. 

Writing in 1799, Croker says in his " Travels in 
Spain":— 

" The habitual temperance of these people is really aston- 
ishing ; I never saw a Spaniard drink a second glass of 
wine. With the lower order of people, a piece of bread 
with an apple, an onion, or a pomegranate, is their usual 
repast." 

And many writers and travellers at different peri- 
ods concur in describing them as temperate, frugal, 
and even abstemious as a rule, testifying that 
"drunkenness is a vice almost unknown in Spain 
among people of a respectable class, and even very 
uncommon among the lower orders." 

An English clergyman, eight years ago, in 1859, 
describing a tour through Spain, remarks, that 
when they were approaching the plains of Cas- 
tile:— 

7 



50 



" It had now become quite evident, from the number of 
beggars, male and female, adult and juvenile, with their 
tattered brown clothing and mahogany complexion, that we 
were at length in veritable Spain." * 

Again he says:f — 

" In all our wanderings through town and country, along 
the highways and by-ways of the land, from Bayonne to 
Gibraltar, we never saw more than four men who were in 
the least intoxicated. If they would only leave off those 
two national sins, bad language and misuse of the knife, 
they would be some of the finest peasantry in the world." 

Our own distinguished fellow-citizen, William 
Cullen Bryant, in a series of letters written in 

1857, says: — 

" The only narcotic in which the' Spaniards indulge to 
any extent is tobacco, in favor of which I have nothing to 
say ; yet it should be remembered in extenuation, that they 
are tempted to this habit by the want of something else to 
do ; that they husband their cigarritos by smoking with 
great deliberation, making a little tobacco go a great way, 
and that they dilute its narcotic fumes with those of the 
paper in which it is folded. With regard to the use of wine, 
I can confirm all that has been said of Spanish sobriety and 
moderation" 

But Spain, though once prosperous and rich, 
became in spite of the temperance and abstinence 

* Koberts's Autumn Tour in Spain," p. 61. fPP- 320, 321. 



51 

of her people, miserably and frightfully poor. Her 
manufactures, once the means of employment of 
hundreds of thousands of workmen, passed into 
decay and neglect. Her agriculture at the begin- 
ning of the present century failed to supply wheat 
enough for the consumption of her people. And 
notwithstanding many institutions of hospitality 
and charity, maintained by the ecclesiastical orders, 
and by contributions from the public funds, the 
poor are so numerous, that beggary in some of the 
provinces .is considered no disgrace, and even 
students have been known to occupy their vacations 
in excursions to raise by begging, the means 
required for their personal support, labor being 
regarded by them as more disreputable than asking 
alms. Supremely ignorant, notwithstanding the 
acknowledged gravity, sobriety, sincerity and gen- 
erosity of the Spanish character, the people are 
miserably poor in the midst of fertility of almost 
tropical exuberance. And their country, — possess- 
ing within herself nearly every mineral and vegeta- 
ble production needful or convenient to mankind, 
holding numerous ports, and a geographical position 
commanding greater commercial advantages than 
any other country in Europe, but without the 
idea of liberty, — sleeps, a torpid mass, a giant 



52 

prostrate and powerless, bound by the principles 
and traditions of five hundred years ago. Not- 
withstanding the abstinence of her people from the 
indulgence of the bowl, neither her future nor her 
present would offer any temptations to the people 
of ISTew England. 

Do not let us deceive ourselves into reversing 
the order of our own history. If drunkenness is 
the essential parent cause, and not usually the 
mere concomitant or consequence, of social degra- 
dation, there ought to be a time found somewhere 
far back in the former ages, when our own ancestors 
were sober, virtuous and happy; but when, visited 
by the seductive fruit of the vine, and falling into 
the snare of unwonted and alluring temptation, the 
shadow of a great woe came over them, never to. 
pass away until the wine shall cease to redden in 
the cup. But the truth is otherwise. There has 
never been any such day of innocence and happiness, 
since Adam was banished from Eden. And yet, it 
is not difficult to trace back the steps of the pro- 
gress of that country from which most Americans 
sprung, to times long before the introduction of 
spirits, or wines, or beer, or even ale itself into 
England. 



53 

The Britons, prior to the Roman conquest, knew 
so little of agriculture, were so rude and barbarous, 
that the strongest liquor they had, was mead, or 
honey mixed with water and allowed to ferment, — 
a product of the rudest and simplest kind, and of 
which the quantity possible must have been of 
necessity very little. But nevertheless, those were 
days of the spiritual domination of the Druids, of 
the darkest superstition, and of the brutal sacrifice 
of innocent human victims. 

Under the Anglo-Saxons, parents are known to 
have exposed their children in the market place 
for sale like cattle. The poverty of the poor and 
the helplessness of their lot were such that on 
occasions of famine, to which in former times, 
England, rich, fertile and merry, but ignorant and 
unthrifty, was no stranger, many of them who were 
free, having no means of living, sold themselves 
into slavery. During all the feudal ages, private 
wars raged constantly. The feudal lords lived in a 
state of war against each other, and of rapine 
towards all mankind. A great portion of the peo- 
ple were helpless bondmen. All Europe was a 
scene of internal anarchy during the middle ages, 
and though England was less exposed to the scourge 
of private war than most nations on the conti- 



54 

nent, she endured tumultuous rapine and frightful 
social disorder. The whole population of Eng- 
land, covering a territory seven or eight times as 
large as Massachusetts, was not, five hundred years 
ago, a million greater in number than the present 
inhabitants of our own Commonwealth. "When 
Latin ceased to be a living language, the newly 
formed, or modern tongues, not being used in pub- 
lic documents or correspondence, the very use of 
books or letters was almost wholly unknown to 
the people. Schools, confined to cathedrals and 
monasteries, and exclusively designed for ecclesias- 
tical purposes, afforded no encouragement or 
opportunity to the laity. It was rare for one of 
them, of whatever rank, to be able to write his 
name. Even the minor clergy were sometimes 
unable to translate into their own language the 
words they chanted in the celebration of the mass. 
The barons tyrannized over both serfs and tenants, 
and from the oppression of their absolute will the 
humble and despised could expect little redress and 
no permanent relief. The rudeness of agriculture, 
the absence of enterprising, intelligent commerce, 
the utter poverty of science, the discouragement of 
all the arts by the nobles who scorned everything 
but arms, kept down the poor, and rendered the 



55 

masses both hopeless and contemptible. "War, 
slavery and ignorance conld not fail to exhibit as 
their natnral concomitant, the coarse, sensual indul- 
gence of appetite, both excessive and depraved. 
Revelry and wassail distinguished the festivities 
and rejoicings of victory and the celebration of 
public events, invaded the solemnities of the 
church, and divided with indolence and the chase 
the empire of private life, whenever arms were 
silent. And what better fate or fortune could have 
been expected for the common poor, the serf, the 
follower, the retainer, than the humble and remote 
imitation of his lord? 

The people were saved from the sense of insup- 
portable misery, of conscious degradation, and 
of infinite hopelessness, by the brutishness of 
manners and their capacity for loiv enjoyments. 
Humanity, like Psyche in Grecian fable, endur- 
ing servitude and trial, wandering about in search 
of her lost but immortal love, is invisibly comforted 
and sustained. She wears always the wings which 
will one day unfold themselves for flight, when, 
purified both by passion and misfortune, she is 
ready for happiness in re-union with the lover 
whose immortality she has come to share. "Wan- 
dering, like the maiden from temple to temple, 



56 

scorned, buffeted and oppressed, humanity retreats 
behind mortality, which shelters while it beclouds 
the soul. A tender and divine spirit is forever 
watching over her, softening calamity, whispering 
hope, providing deliverance, and assisting her con- 
quest. By a universal law of nature, matter gravi- 
tates. But by a universal spiritual law, the soul 
aspires. There is a limit to moral disease. There 
is always a balm, and a physician in Gilead. The 
cure is often slow; but the patient lives forever. 

Descending to a later era, I need only to borrow 
Macaulay's vivid picture of the character of Eng- 
land during the century between the Tudors and 
the Guelphs: 

" There is scarcely a page of the history or lighter 
literature of the seventeenth century which does not contain 
some proof that our ancestors were less humane than their 
posterity. The discipline of workshops, of schools, of private 
families, though not more efficient than at present, were infi- 
nitely harsher. Masters, well born and bred, were in the habit 
of beating their servants. Pedagogues knew no way of impart- 
ing knowledge but by beating their pupils. Husbands, of 
decent station, were not ashamed to beat their wives. The 
implacability of hostile factions was such as we can scarcely 
conceive. "Whigs were disposed to murmur because Staf- 
ford was suffered to die without seeing his bowels burned 
before his face. Tories reviled and insulted Russell as his 
coach passed from the Tower to the scaffold in Lincoln's Inn 



57 

Fields. As little mercy was shown by the populace to suf- 
ferers of a humbler rank. If an offender was put into the 
pillory, it was well if he escaped with life from the shower 
of brick-bats and paving-stones. If he was tied to the cart's 
tail, the crowd pressed round him, imploring the hangman 
to give it the fellow well, and make him howl. Gentlemen 
arranged parties of pleasure to Bridewell on court days, for the 
purpose of seeing the wretched women who beat hemp there 
whipped. A man pressed to death for refusing to plead, a 
woman burned for coining, excited less sympany than is 
now felt for a galled horse or an over-driven ox. Fights, 
compared with which a boxing-match is a refined and humane 
spectacle, were among the favorite diversions of a large part 
of the town. Multitudes assembled to see gladiators hack 
each other to pieces with deadly weapons, and shouted with 
delight when one of the combatants lost a finger or an eye. 
The prisons were hells on earth, seminaries of every crime, 
and of every disease. At the assizes, the lean and yellow 
culprits brought with them from their cells to the dock an 
atmosphere of stench and pestilence which sometimes avenged 
them signally on bench, bar, and jury. But on all this mis- 
ery society looked with profound indifference. Nowhere 
could be found that sensitive and restless compassion which 
has, in our time, extended a powerful protection to the fac- 
tory child, to the Hindoo widow, to the negro slave, which 
peers into the stores and water.casks of every emigrant ship, 
which winces at every lash laid on the back of a drunken 
soldier, which will not suffer the thief in the hulks to be ill- 
fed or over-worked, and which has repeatedly endeavored to 
save the life even of the murderer." * 

* Macaulay's History of England, Vol. i., pp. 394, 395, (Harper's octavo 
edition.) 

8 



58 

A hundred years ago, in the habits of the best 
Englishmen, there existed the traces and conse- 
quences of the old demoralization, England was 
free. The long agony with the Stuarts was over. 
A new era had begun, of fame, of prosperity, of 
culture, of opportunity for the people, of literature, 
of ideas. But the social disease was not cured. 
The best were still afflicted by it. Drunkenness 
still remained, as one of its symptoms, and expres- 
sions, on the upper surface and in the purest 
society. Bigotry, both religious and political, was 
a repulsive and characteristic feature of the coun- 
try gentleman. He hated his neighbor, of different 
opinions, because they differed. The machinery of 
both "Whig and Tory was unlimited bribery. The 
" Folly " coffee-house was his resort in town, where 
rural ladies listened to words of compliment from 
the wits and beaux of the time, which those of our 
own time would not dare to read. The duchess 
and the courtesan were alike visitors, where the 
gay maskers indulged in»the allusions and jests of 
a corrupt taste and a licensed opportunity. w At 
the beginning of the eighteenth century," (says 
a recent historian,) "and long after, we see no 
struggle against great social evils, on the part of 
the clergy or the laity. Every attempt at social 



59 

reform was left to the legislature, which was 
utterly indifferent to those manifestations of wick- 
edness and crime, that ought to have been dealt 
with by the strong hand. Education, in any large 
sense, there was none. Disease pursued its rav- 
ages, unchecked by any attempt to mitigate the 
evils of standing pools before the cottage door, and 
pestilent ditches in the towns. * * * There were 
evils so abhorrent to humanity, that their endur- 
ance, without the slightest endeavor to mitigate or 
remove them, was an opprobrium of that age. 
The horrible state of the prisons was well known. 
The nosegay laid on the desk of the judge at every 
assize proclaimed that starvation and filth were 
sweeping away far more than perished by the 
executioner, terrible as that number was. * * * 
London, and all other great towns, were swarming 
with destitute children, who slept in ash-holes, and 
at street doors. They were left to starve, and in 
due course to become thieves, and be hanged. * * 
One- fifth of the whole population were paupers"* 
Disease, filth, ignorance, licentious manners, 
neglect of human want and woe, judicial cruelty, 
and pauperism! It needs only drunkenness to 
complete the picture. It was not the cause of all 

* Popular History of England, by Charles Knight, Vol. v., page 60. 



60 

this. But it was a necessary concomitant; a part 
of the natural expression of an almost infinite in- 
ward evil. And I sometimes wonder whether, in 
permitting so many to yield to this merely sensual 
indulgence of orutish men, Divine Providence had 
not saved them from becoming human devils. That 
feature was not wanting, in the age to which I 
allude. I will allow the same historian to finish 
the description. 

Quoting from the " Guardian," he goes on to 
say : " r A method of spending one's time agreeably 
is a thing so little studied, that 'the common amuse- 
ment of our young gentlemen, especially of such 
as are at a distance from those of the first breeding, 
is drinking.' Yet we have abundant evidence that 
those f of the first breeding ' were often the most 
intemperate. The moralists were not exempt from 
the common vice of our young gentlemen. Swift 
says : c I dined with Mr. Addison and Dick Stuart, 
Lord Mountjoy's brother, a treat of Addison's. 
They were half fuddled, but not I, for I mixed 
water with my wine.' " 

Gaming was the universal passion of the reign 
of Anne. In the first number of the " Tatler," it 
is said of Will's Coffee House : " This place is very 
much altered since Mr. Dryden frequented it. 



61 

Where you used to see songs, epigrams and sat- 
ires, in the hands of every one you met, you have 
now only a pack of cards. Into these places of 
public resort the lowest sharpers found their way; 
and gentlemen were not ashamed to stake their 
money against the money of the most infamous of 
society." 

In Italy, writes Steele, w a cobbler may be heard 
working to an opera tune; and there is not a 
laborer or handicraftman that, in the cool of the 
evening, does not relieve himself with solos and 
sonnets." But, w bn the contrary, our honest 
countrymen have so little inclination to music, that 
they seldom begin to sing until they are drunk? 
Sir John Hawkins has described the musical enter- 
tainments which were offered to the middle classes 
at this period. He says that "the landlords of 
public houses hired performers, and hither came 
very unrefined audiences, to drink and to smoke." 

Writing of English life and manners, at about 
the end of the last century, or just after the Amer- 
ican Revolution, Miss Martineau thus exhibits the 
same connection of sensual vulgarity on the sur- 
face, with deep and pervading contempt of the 
sacredness of humanity at the core : — * 

* History of England, from 1816 to 1854, with an Introduction, 1800 to 
1815. Vol. i., p. 28, 29. 



62 

" While the course of daily living was hard to the work- 
ing man, and his future precarious, the Law was very cruel. 
The records of the Assizes in the Chronicle of Events are 
sickening to read. The vast and absurd variety of offences 
for which men and women were sentenced to death by the 
score, out of which one-third or so were really hanged, gives 
now an impression of devilish levity in dealing with human 
life ; and must, at the time, have precluded all rational con- 
ception on the part of the many, as to what Law is, to say 
nothing of that attachment to it, and reverence and trust in 
regard to it, which are indispensable to the true citizen 
temper." 

" The general health was at a lower average among all 
these distresses than was even safe for a people who might 
at any moment have to struggle for their existence. The 
habit of intemperance in ivine was still prevalent among' gen- 
tlemen, so that we read of one public man after another 
whose death or incapacity was ascribable to disease from 
drinking. Members of the cabinet, members of parliament 
and others, are quietly reported to have said this and that 
ivhen they were drunk. The spirit decanters were brought 
out in the evenings in middle-class houses, as a matter of 
course ; and gout and other liver and stomach disorders 
were prevalent to a degree which the children of our time 
have no conception of. During the scarcity, the diseases of 
scarcity abounded, of course." 

But allow me in a moment to relieve the picture. 
You all know how mighty and universal has been 
the movement of the nineteenth century. The axe 
has been laid at the root of the tree. There has 



63 

been a patient, hopeful, scientific and learned, as 
well as a pious, philanthropy. The disease was 
a radical disease. The, cure is a radical reform. 
The recognition of the people, of their wants and 
woes, their essential capacity, their rights, their 
progressive tendency, their citizenship, their hu- 
manity, the oneness of man with his brother man, 
the benignant fatherhood of Almighty God, — this 
recognition, which exposes the littleness of worldly 
distinction in the presence of this unity of the 
brotherhood, has waked up the intelligence, the 
heart and soul of England, to the work of studious 
and persistent reform, as radical as the malady of 
which Love is the healer and Justice the medicine. 

Dating back from the middle to the beginning 
of this nineteenth century, what had been accom- 
plished in this work ? The vice of drunkenness 
had gradually disappeared, with the coarseness, of 
which it was the natural expression, giving way to 
those humanizing and refining influences, with 
which sensual and brutal manners are inconsis- 
tent. 

" One of the most distinguished of Frenchmen 
comes as ambassador to England in 1840, and 
regarding with a philosophical intelligence both the 
great and the humble, he thus contrasts the past 



64 

with the present. Looking back to the end of the 
eighteenth century, he says that there were at that 
time, even in the elevated glasses of English soci- 
ety, many remains of gross and disorderly manners. 
Precisely because England had been for centuries 
a country of liberty, the most opposite results of 
that liberty had been developed in startling con- 
trasts. A puritan severity was maintained side by 
side with the corruptions of the courts of Charles 
II. and the first Georges; habits almost barbarous 
kept their hold in the midst of the progress of civ- 
ilization; the splendor of power and of riches had 
not banished from the higher social regions the 
excesses of a vulgar intemperance. Even the ele- 
vation of ideas and the supremacy of talent did not 
always carry with them delicacy of taste; for the 
Sheridan who had been electrifying parliament by 
his eloquence might the same night have been 
picked up drunk in the streets." 

" M. Guizot goes on to say, ? It is in our time 
that these shocking incongruities in the state of 
manners in England have vanished, and that Eng- 
lish society has become as polished as it is free; 
where gross habits are constrained to be hidden or 
to be reformed, and where civilization is day by day 
showing itself more general and more harmonious .' 



65 

Two conditions of progress, he continues, which 
rarely go together, have been developed and attained 
during half a century in England. The laws of 
morality have been strengthened, and manners have 
at the same time become softer, less inclined to 
violent excesses, more elegant." * 

This eminent French writer and statesman says 
also that the double progress of a stricter morality, 
and a refinement of manners, was not confined to the 
higher and middle classes, but was very apparent 
amongst the bulk of the people. " The domestic 
life, laborious and regular, extends its empire over 
these classes. They comprehend-, they seek, they 
enjoy, more honest and more delicate pleasures than 
brutal quarrels or drunkenness. The amelioration 
is certainly very incomplete. Gross passions and 
disorderly habits are always fermenting in the bosom 
of obscure and idle misery; and in London, Man- 
chester, or Glasgow, there are ample materials for 
the most hideous descriptions. But take it all in 
all, civilization and liberty have in England, during 
the course of the nineteenth century, turned to the 
profit of good rather than of evil. Religious faith, 
Christian charity, philanthropic benevolence, the 

* Popular History of England, by Charles Knight, Vol. viii., pp. 401, 402. 
9 



66 

intelligent and indefatigable activity of the higher 
classes, and good sense spread amongst all classes, 
have battled, and now battle effectually against the 
vices of society, and the evil inclinations of human 
nature." * 

This progress was not mechanical. It was 
dynamic. It was not Jewish, nor Mohammedan; 
but it was Christian. It was not due to law, but 
to liberty. It came not from the thunders of burn- 
ing Sinai, but from the silent inward voice. 

A writer in the " Democratic Review," in 1848, 
discussing the topic of w Poverty and Misery " in 
their relation to w Eeform and Progress," mainly in 
the direction of politics, laments the apparent defeat 
of the people in the successive popular struggles of 
the old world. He records the continued existence 
of the old poverty, and misery, with modifications 
only, notwithstanding the promise which heralded 
the revolutions of that period. He turns from 
cause to cause, from the nostrum of one political 
doctor to the palmistry of another, and slides at last 
into an exclamation of despair at the experience of 
the old world, and the prospect at home, in view of 
the unknown cause of what he discovered at last 



i 

* Guizot — " Memoires pour servir a l'histoire de mon temps," Tome v., 
1862. 



67 

was " a general and obstinate disease" " From sta- 
tistics lately published/' he remarks, when alluding 
to France, " it appears that one-eighth of her pop- 
ulation are habitually clothed in rags ; that nearly 
three-fifths never eat wheaten bread; that very 
nearly two-thirds wear wooden clogs instead of 
shoes; * * * and more than ten-elevenths of the 
whole population cannot afford to consume sugar 
and animal food." How much of this continued 
depression and poverty was to be ascribed to drink- 
ing the wines of France may be seen in the fact 
that a more efficient prohibition was found in the 
very poverty of the masses than ever slumbered in 
the arm of legislative power. For " more than three- 
fourths " of the whole population were shown by 
the same statistics, and declared by the same writer, 
in the same sentence, to be so poor that " they can- 
not get ivine to drink" notwithstanding that is and 
was a staple of the country. The truth, I think, 
may be discovered by looking straight down to the 
bottom of the well. The French people inherited 
the consequences logically flowing from earlier bar- 
barism, from Roman conquests, from tribal, local, 
private and national wars, from the feudal servi- 
tudes, partly seen in a debt mortgaging the lands 
of the people, and weighing them down by an 



68 

annual interest exceeding that of the public debt 
of Great Britain, leaving the proprietors and cul- 
tivators not more than twenty-four per cent, of the 
whole annual production, for the maintenance of 
their families, while the low estate of agriculture, 
(which means again the absence of science and 
machinery,) gave an average yield of only fourteen 
bushels of wheat, or twenty bushels of potatoes, to 
an acre of ground. 

Thirty years ago, at the accession of Victoria, 
the public mind had been already somewhat aroused 
by the report of a distinguished architect, concern- 
ing a district in London in which dwelt squalid mis- 
ery, in perishing houses, undrained, unventilated, 
in pestilential alleys, where the typhus and every 
form of epidemic and contagion always rioted. 
Soon after, inquiries promoted by parliament were 
extended through formal commissions into other 
large cities of England and Wales, and into Scot- 
land. Mr. Chadwick's report* exhibits the frightful 
result of a death-rate among these poor unfortu- 
nates of the lowest classes, doubling the mortality 
of their opulent neighbors. This mortality was 
largely owing to habits of filth and intemperance, 

* Report of the Poor Law Commission. 



69 

but those habits were induced by the unavoidable deg- 
radation of physical causes which no virtue could 
override. "In closed courts where the sunshine 
never penetrated; where a breath of fresh air never 
circulated; where noxious vapors filled every corner 
from the horrible cesspools; where the density of 
population was so excessive, as in itself to be suffi- 
cient to produce disease; where a single room was 
often occupied by a whole family, without regard to 
age or sex, — the wonder is how the poor lived at 
all, uncared for by the rich who knew them not, 
neglected by their employers, who, in some trades 
exposed them to labor in workshops not far supe- 
rior in ventilation to the Black Hole of Calcutta. 
Amongst these careless and avaricious employers, 
the master tailors were the most notorious, who 
would huddle sixty or eighty workmen close 
together, nearly knee to knee, in a room fifty feet 
long by twenty feet broad, lighted from above, 
where the temperature in summer was thirty degrees 
higher than the temperature outside. Young men 
from the country fainted when they were first con- 
fined in such a life- destroying prison : the maturer 
ones sustained themselves by gin, till they perished 
of consumption, or typhus, or delirium tremens."* 

* Popular History of England, by Charles Knight, Vol. viii., p. 392. . 



70 
One of the most eminent of living physiologists 

« 

says, "Mr. Chadwick has shown that many are 
driven to drinking gin as affording a temporary 
relief to the feelings of depression and exhaustion 
produced by living in a noxious atmosphere." * 

Sir James Tennent, seven years ago, addressing 
the institution for promoting Social Science, speaks 
of the condition of the Irish laborers in England, 
of whom much complaint had been made for their 
habits of tippling and pauperism. So late as 1860, 
he describes them as in the possession of " unwhole- 
some dwellings in the most unhealthy portions " of 
the great cities, in whose " comfortless apartments 
domestic enjoyment is little known and the inmates 
are inured from infancy to miasma, damp and 
decay." " Their food," he says, was " in quality, of 
the poorest by which existence can be maintained," 
and they enjoyed " the single excitement of intoxi- 
cation^ 

The testimony of the patient and philosophical 
Liebig is given, with the emphasis of positive opin- 
ion. " In many places destitution and misery have 
been ascribed to the increasing use of spirits. 
This is an error. The use of spirits is not the 
cause, but an effect, of poverty. It is an exception 

* Psychological Inquiries, by Sir Benjamin C. Brodie, p. 78. 



71 

from the rule when a well-fed man becomes a spirit 
drinker. On the other hand, when the laborer 
earns by his work less than is required to provide 
the amount of food which is indispensable in order 
to restore fully his working powers, an unyielding, 
inexorable law or necessity compels him to have 
recourse to spirits. He must work, but in conse- 
quence of insufficient food, a certain portion of his 
working power is daily wanting. Spirits, by their 
action on the nerves, enable him to make up the 
deficient power at the expense of his body ; to con- 
sume to-day that quantity which ought naturally to 
have been employed a day later. He draws, so to 
speak, a bill on his health, which must always be 
renewed, because, for want of means he cannot 
take up; he consumes his capital instead of his 
interest ; and the result is the inevitable bankruptcy 
of his body."* 

Bad as the condition is of the laboring classes in 
England, Mr. ^IcCulloch, the political economist, 
writing in 1854, affirms that the condition of most 
classes of work-people had improved since the 
close of the American war; that they were better 
fed, better clothed and better lodged, than at any 
former period. " Drunkenness and immorality," 

* Letters on Chemistry, 3d London edition, p. 455. 



72 

be adds, " if they have not materially abated, have 
not increased; while the manners of all classes 
have been humanized and softened." He affirms 
also, that " great improvement had taken place in 
the health and in the longevity of the population." 
Admitting that w the condition of the laboring class 
is far from prosperous," and that "the middle 
classes have always evinced far more prudence and 
forethought than those below them," he testifies 
that the work-people of the present day are less 
vicious and improvident, and more industrious, than 
their predecessors of any former age. But, why 
have not the humblest laboring class, while accom- 
plishing their own measure of progress, equalled 
their superiors of the middle class in the ratio of 
advancement? It is simply because — as a wise 
writer says — " wretchedness is incompatible with 
excellence: you can never make a wise and virtu- 
ous people out of a starving one." 

]Nor can more be demanded of a T^pdy of men, on 
whom has accumulated the weight of centuries of 
wrong. For the great mass of the English poor is 
nothing but the continuation of the race of villeins 
or slaves, whose servitude to the baron has been 
exchanged for dependence on the parish and subor- 
dination to the powers of society scarcely less 



73 

degrading. The emancipated serf had lived a life 

of thoughtless and hopeless dependence, without 

instructed prudence or trained forethought, in the 

midst of those who contemned his weakness and 

his low estate. In times of pervading ignorance, 

and when society was too unskilled and unthrifty 

to protect itself against constantly recurring famine, 

he had received the form of personal freedom, but 

not its power. And thus the vices and sensuality 

of a thousand years, and the essential evil out of 

which they grew, descending and reappearing in 

some variety but substantial identity, age by age, 

linger longest and will die out the latest in that 

class of men rendered comparatively worthless 

by servitude. 

But even they have illustrated the recuperative 

energy of human nature, — the power of moral 

agencies and awakened intelligence to reiuew and 

restore. I cannot but give honor to the social 

reformers, preaching the truths of nature and her 

science, for the deliverance of the suffering poor, 

and I give honor also to that very class of weary 

and depressed laborers, for their response. The 

degradation of circumstances has yielded already. 

Theirs never was a voluntary depravity which 

elected drunkenness for the mere love of gin, and 
10 



74 

accepted misery for the sake of the bowl. As 
social science advances, as society itself leads, so 
they will continue to follow. They may yet be 
brutish, yea, and drunken too; but drunkenness 
will disappear as the light shines in on the darkened 
intellect, as opportunity develops manhood, as hope 
visits and encourages the heart. 

Crime and tippling are so linked together, that if 
we could banish tippling, the judges have a thou- 
sand times declared that crime, unable to live alone, 
would follow too. But crime is already going. 
The influences of which I speak have already 
diminished crime, by striking at the common causes 
of crime and drunkenness both. The population 
of England and "Wales in 1849, is given in the 
"Statesman's Year Book" at 17,552,000, and in 
1863, (or fourteen years later,) at 20,554,137 — an 
increase of a little more than three millions. But 
the number of convictions for crime in the same 
period descended from 21,001 to 15,799, — a dimi- 
nution of criminal offenders of 5,202, or a little less 
than twenty-five per cent. In other words, while 
in 1849 the number of criminal offenders was in 
the proportion of one in 835 of the aggregate pop- 
ulation, in 1863 the fraction had fallen to one in 
1,300. The average number of children attending 






school had more than doubled. Similar, though 
less striking results, appear in Scotland. And in 
Ireland, the apparent diminution of criminal offence 
is so remarkable and unprecedented, that while 
something must perhaps be allowed to improve- 
ment in police and judicial organization, I am con- 
fident that the social history of the island is a still 
more brilliant example of the powerful moral effect 
produced by the material and educational advance- 
ment of a people. 

Less than three years ago, John Bright, the 
great political and social reformer, in a speech 
opposing in the House of Commons a bill for more 
restrictive treatment of the sale of alcoholic bever- 
ages, bears his own testimony to the progress 
made in those classes most accessible to moral 
influence and the motive of ideas : — 

" I am old enough to remember, when among those classes 
with which we are more familiar than with the working 
people, drunkenness was ten or twenty times more common 
than it is at present. I have been in this House twenty 
years, and during that time I have often partaken of the 
hospitality of various members of the House, and I must 
confess that during the whole of those twenty years, I have 
no recollection of having seen one single person, at any gen- 
tleman's table, who has been in the condition which would 
be at all fairly described by saying that he was drunk. And 



76 



I may say more, — that I do not recollect more than two or 
three occasions, during that time, in which I have observed 
* * * that any gentleman had taken so much as to impair 
his judgment. 

" That is not the state of things which prevailed in this 
country fifty or sixty years ago. We know, therefore, as 
respects this class of persons,— who can always obtain as 
much of these pernicious articles as they desire to have, 
because price to them is no object, — that temperance has 
made great way ; and if it were possible now to make all 
classes in this country as temperate as those of whom I have 
just spoken, we should be amongst the very soberest nations 
of the earth." 

If I am asked to account for the clisajDpearance 
of drunkenness among the more favored classes, 
I appeal to the same cause which has purified lit- 
erature, ameliorated the criminal code, banished 
torture and religious persecution, wrought out 
" Catholic emancipation," extended the ballot, estab- 
lished "model houses" and "ragged schools," 
encouraged innocent amusements, cultivated music 
and the arts, dismissed the barbarity of duelling, 
descended with Howard and Elizabeth Fry into 
the prisons, has flown with Florence Nightingale 
to the battle-field, and penetrated the various 
abodes where " lonely want retires to die," into all 
the wretched retreats of misery, and all the dun- 
geons where society exacts the penalty of crime. 



77 

I appeal to the same universal spirit and the same 
unerring law which renders it "more blessed to 
give than to receive." Intelligence, a higher, 
purer, more liberal culture, wider views and more 
knowledge, and all the material and scientific, as 
well as moral characteristics of modern civilization 
have combined to make the Englishman more 
w brave, tender and true ; " therefore more a gentle- 
man of self-respect and refined manners, as well as 
a man more reverent of the divine image seen in 
all our common human nature. Could Plantaga- 
nets, Tudors and Stuarts, wielding despotic powers; 
could the sovereign pontiff fulminating the pro- 
fessed decrees of heaven, and denouncing the ter- 
rors of hell; could all their powers combined, their 
earthly penalties and eternal pains, have accom- 
plished this moral regeneration? ]STo, gentle- 
men, you know they could not have dane it. 
As the Apostle taught of the Early Church, so 
true philosophy declares of the secular corporation 
of human society; that we are one body and mem- 
bers one of another. The same God who revealed 
something more thantwas yet known of the laws of 
the natural universe to one, taught cunning inven- 
tions in mechanism to another, spread out the 
broad pages and unfolded the sealed books of 



78 

human history to another, and uncovered to an- 
other the mysteries of this throbbing heart and 
this scheming brain, has in like manner inspired 
others with loftier ideas of Right, and anointed 
their eyes with clearer visions of Duty. All these 
have become leaders of the people, and co-operators 
in the great social regeneration. 

The same phenomena have been manifested on 
our own side of the Atlantic. Like causes here 
have in like manner purified, softened, refined the 
habits of social life at home. And the excesses of 
gluttony and drunkenness which used to mar the 
festivities of former times have, so far as I have ever 
been a witness, and as the proof shows, disap- 
peared. But there has never been on earth any 
human governmental power which could have 
brought it to pass. The law possesses absolutely 
no reforming power. It can punish, can terrify, 
hold in forcible restraint. It cannot convert nor 
can it touch the springs of feeling or of thought. 
Unconvinced, untouched, unconverted, do you sap- 
pose the ingenuity and the armies of the world 
could have devised a statute and concentrated a 
force which could have dominated personal habits 
in those spheres of society, and have made any 



79 

permanent and pervading impression on social 
conduct and private manners? 

Drunkenness was naturally one of the forms 
which vice assumed in New England. So far as it 
depended on the mere fact of opportunity for 
indulgence, it was partly due to our nearness to 
the "West Indies, and to the trade by which our 
lumber was exchanged for their molasses. The 
peculiar product of our distillation was the result 
of the lumber trade with the "West India Islands, 
just as the production of whiskey is now the result 
of the superabundant grain crops of the Western 
States. A hard climate, much exposure, little 
variety in food, and great want of culinary skill, 
few amusements, the absence of light cheering 
beverages, a sense of care and responsibility culti- 
vated intensely, and the prevalence of ascetic and 
gloomy theories of life, duty and Providence — 
have, in time past, all combined to increase the 
perils of the people from the seductive narcotic. 
A man whose virtue was weak, or whose discour- 
agements were great, or whose burdens were 
heavy, or in whom the spirit waged unequal war 
with the allurements of the flesh; or even one in 
whom a certain native gayety strove with the un- 
welcome exactions of the elders, was often easily 



80 

its victim. Independence, intelligence, self-respect, 
broader views, kinder and tenderer sympathies, the 
cultivation of the finer tastes, the love and appre- 
ciation of beauty, a truer humanity — not to speak 
of better social theories — all made more general 
and pervading in our society — have gradually by 
divine favor been made instrumental in the deliver- 
ance of our people from that bondage. I have not 
mentioned a greater conscientiousness in the cat- 
alogue of causes, for I do not believe that conscien- 
tiousness has ever been greater than in ~New Eng- 
land, nor that it is greater now than it was in other 
times. It was a characteristic of New England 
from the first. It was always a source of greatness 
in her people. But it has been often morbid and 
even superstitious. 

The evil of drunkenness needed to be met by a 
gracious Gospel kindling the heart, not by a crush- 
ing sense of guilt goading the conscience. The 
temperance reformation sprung up out of the heart 
of a deeply moved humanity. It was truly and 
genuinely a Gospel work. It was a mission of love 
and hope. And the power with which it wrought 
was the evidence of its inspiration. While it held 
fast by its original simplicity, while it pleaded, with 
the self-forgetfulness of Gospel cliscipleship, and 



81 

sought out with the generosity of an all-embracing 
charity, while it twined itself around the heart- 
strings and quietly persuaded the erring, or with an 
honest boldness rebuked without anger — it was 
strong in the Lord and in the power of his might, 
verifying the prophecy of old, that one might chase 
a thousand and two put ten thousand to flight. But 
when it passed out of the hands of its Evangelists 
and passed into the hands of the centurions and 
the hirelings; when it became a part of the capital 
of political speculation, and went into the jugglery 
of the caucus; when men voted to lay abstinence 
as a burden on their neighbors, while they felt no 
duty of such abstinence themselves, (even under 
the laws of their own creation) ; when the Gospel, 
the Christian Church and the ministers of religion 
were yoked to the car of a political triumph ; then 
it became the victim of one of the most ancient 
and most dangerous of all the delusions of history. 
Mr. Frederick Hill, an English barrister, and 
formerly "Inspector of Prisons," in a work pub- 
lished in London in 1853, discussed in a spirit of 
intelligent philanthropy the topic of "Crime: its 
Amount, Causes and Remedies." He declares his 
belief, " as the result of many years of inquiry and 

observation," that crime "is steadily decreasing and 
11 



82 

taking a milder and milder form;" and that this 
decrease is not only positive bnt comparative; so 
that notwithstanding the increased wealth and pop- 
ulation, "and estimating the extent of crime by the 
average amount of privation, fear and suffering 
which it causes to each member of society, the 
decrease is great indeed." 

He classifies the w chief causes " of. crime thus : 
" 1. Bad training and ignorance. 2. Drunkenness 
and other kinds of profligacy. 3. Poverty. 4. 
Habits of violating the laws, engendered by the 
creation of artificial offences. 5. Other measures 
of legislation interfering unnecessarily in private 
actions or presenting examples of injustice. 6. 
Temptations to crime caused by the probability of 
escape or subjection to insufficient punishment." 

Two of these are very suggestive. Artificial 
Offences, and Meddlesome Legislation, and that felt 
to be unjust, are indeed causes of crime of which 
the philosophical legislator cannot afford to be 
ignorant. Artificial offences put a large class of 
people, and often that the least discriminating and 
instructed, into needless antagonism with the law. 
Confounding of moral distinctions on the side of 
the law, begets a corresponding confusion in the 
mind of the citizen. If the law treats the sale of 



83 

a mug of beer, or sweet cider, as of like delin- 
quency with the crime of larceny, how long will it 
take the humble and the unlearned to conclude that 
the law is either a sham, unworthy of veneration, 
or else to jump to the converse of the first proposi- 
tion, and vote the larceny of an article to be no 
worse than the selling of the beer or the cider? 
So, therefore, every statute denouncing the penal- 
ties of the criminal law against men, in violation 
of the commonly received sense of justice con- 
cerning human relations in the civil state, becomes, 
by reason of that very excess, a generator of evil. 
The laws under which men are punishable, can 
have no moral value unless the appeal can also be 
made to the consciences of men; challenging them 
boldly to the confession of the apostle, "Where- 
fore the law is holy, and the commandment holy, 
and just, and good." 

But, I pray your attention now to the first three 
in the category of causes of crime: Ignorance 
and had training — Drunkenness and oilier hinds of 
profligacy — Poverty. And when you shall have 
seen, (what all investigation proves,) how few ever 
fall into the criminal class, who have had the advan- 
tages of the simplest elements of learning — the 
acquisition of the power to read and, write well 



84 

their own tongue; who have even been taught any 
trade involving skill; and who have enjoyed immu- 
nity from the miseries of poverty; you then will 
see how drunkenness itself yields to motive and 
encouragement. 

Against the common notion that the poorer 
classes commit fewer penal offences when they are 
straitened by seasons of unusual poverty, than 
they do when they are not so poor as to be unable 
to get drink, Mr. Hill opposes the result of his 
wide observation as Inspector of Prisons. Against 
this opinion Mr. Hill sets " the general fact that, in 
periods of prosperity, our \their\ prisons are com- 
paratively empty? The truth was undoubtedly 
just this — and it is undoubtedly true here as in 
England — the ignorant, neglected, poverty-stricken 
and forlorn are also drunken. 

But, do you urge that if you can maintain your 
statute of prohibition, you will remove the tempta- 
tion of drunkenness out of their way — gaining 
thus much, at least; and that, besides, you will 
gain a better chance to attack ignorance and 
poverty with success? I reply that if men were 
simply intelligent machines there might be some- 
thing in your plan. The error in your plan is that 
you allow nothing for the human will, nothing for 



85 

the elasticity and enterprise with which it accom- 
modates itself to new exigencies, whenever you 
challenge a direct combat between the law on the 
one hand and the purpose of even the humblest of 
the people on the other hand. The denunciations 
of positive law, unsustained by a successful appeal 
to the prevailing sense of right and justice, are 
little else than a trumpet-call to battle. Let the 
effort be the prohibition of a dangerous but seduc- 
tive beverage, and let the period be a dark age, or 
let the manners of the time be generally gross and 
coarse, or let the amusements of the people be few 
and their intelligence low, or let there be a class of 
underfed and dejected laborers, or beggars — and 
the effect will be as disastrous as the experience of 
England in 1737, of Sweden long ago, and of 
Scotland. Both McCulloch in his book on " Taxa- 
tion," and Porter in his w Progress of the Nation," 
have portrayed the failure of the English experi- 
ment. The reaction was both swift and irresistible. 
In the M charges " of Recorder Hill of Birming- 
ham, whose long and earnest devotion to the 
removal of drunkenness entitles him to universal 
gratitude, we find a discussion of English prohibi- 
tion. He affirms that " the impediments thrown in 
the way of the venders of alcoholic drinks, partly 



86 

by the imposition of duties on the manufacture or 
importation of the article, and partly by the system 
of licenses, had diminished, or at all events kept in 
check the consumption of intoxicating liquors. 
"We need, gentlemen, no statistics to prove to us, 
that the state of the country in 1830, was much 
better in regard to temperance than it was a century 
before that period." But the philanthropic Recorder 
utters one sentence in describing the fate of the 
legislation of 1737, [which was the same statute 
alluded to in the testimony of Mr. Derby,] which 
(coming from a judge, in whose heart both the idea 
of liberty, and the sentiment of humanity had alike 
a share,) is an emphatic admonition to ourselves. 
It is in these very words : " And doubtless it could 
only have been successful among a people, who to 
the sensuality and ignorance of the English popu- 
lace should have added the slavish obedience of the 
Russian serf? 

In Sweden, notwithstanding the laws against 
intoxication, rigorously enforced, and those forbid- 
ding the gift or the sale of spirituous liquors to 
workmen, servants, soldiers, minors, &c, the distil- 
lation by the people in their own houses carried up 
the production of spirits to an annual average of 
ten gallons for each inhabitant. In Scotland, we 



87 

are informed by the Temperance Prize-Essay of 
Doct. Lees, that in the second century, Argadus, 
the administrator of the realm, pulled down the 
houses of the sellers of strong drink, confiscated 
their goods and banished the men; that in the ninth 
century Constantine II. added the punishment of 
death to the taverners who resisted the decree; 
that in the sixteenth century, although there were 
no public taverns known, the citizens brewed their 
own ale, K their usual drink," and they entertained 
the travellers ; that in just one hundred years later, 
multitudes of drunken beggars infested Scotland, 
and in plentiful years, robbed poor people living 
remote from neighbors, and used to meet in the 
mountains feasting and rioting for days together, 
and that on all public occasions they were found, 
both men and women, w perpetually drunk." The 
sheriff of Lanarkshire, Mr. Allison, testified* in 
1838, that at every tenth house in Glasgow spirits 
were sold, and that the whiskey drunk in Glasgow 
was probably twice or thrice as much as in any 
similar population on the globe. 

The report by the Secretary of the Board of 
State Charities of Massachusetts, just printed (cov- 
ering the year 1866,) declares in these emphatic 

* Porter's Progress of the Nation, p. 679. 



88 

words: w It is notorious that the great mass of 
criminals is made up of the poor, the ill-taught, 
the ill-conditioned , and, in a double sense, the 
unfortunate" 

w The proportion in the Commonwealth of those 
who cannot read and write, among persons capable 
of crime, is between six and seven per cent., while 
the proportion of criminals who cannot read and 
write, for the last ten years, has been between 
thirty and forty per cent, or more than five times as 
great" 

K Out of 11,260 prisoners, only 429, or less than 
one in twenty-Jive, are reported as ever having 
owned the value of $1,000." 

The Secretary mentions that 7,343, or about two- 
thirds of this number, are set down as intemperate, 
which he deems too low an estimate. 

Those figures show that the social law I have so 
often affirmed, holds good in Massachusetts, and up 
to the present time. It is from K the poor, the ill- 
taught, the ill-conditioned, and in a double sense, 
the unfortunate," that the ranks of pauperism and 
insanity, and crime and drunkenness, are yearly 
reinforced. It is true that the Secretary speaks of 
drunkenness as the " chief occasion of crime." 
And that it is connected or associated with crime, 



89 

being one of the symptoms of the same disease of 
which crime is another, one of the manifestations of 
social degradation, one of the proximate causes too 
of many an offence, is true. But — let me put a 
case which will illustrate the true relation of drink- 
ing to crime. A few years ago, a young man, not 
twenty years old, who had never been to school, nor 
to church, had never learned his letters, had never 
heard the blessed name of Jesus, save when pro- 
fanely uttered, urged by the desire of" his wife for 
money, and goaded by her taunts, loaded his gun 
with powder and shot, and loaded himself with 
whiskey and gunpowder, and marched forth to the 
highway, and shot to death another man, (then trav- 
elling his rounds to deliver, as it happened, liquors 
to his country customers,) and robbed him on the 
spot. At his trial nearly all the witnesses, being 
residents of the same neighborhood, unable to write 
their names, made their mark only, on the certifi- 
cate-book of the officer. I suppose this murder is 
reckoned among the crimes chargeable to drinking. 
And, perhaps, the mixture of whiskey and gun- 
powder which he drank, blunted his nerves and 
calmed his agitation, and thus fortified his audacity, 
to the extent of enabling him to do what would 

otherwise have been too much for him. Without 
12 



90 

such drink, perhaps, and without a gun, certainly, he 
would never have shot his victim. But the purpose of 
violence and robbery was formed before he drank. 
The crime was sufficiently complete, as a purpose of 
the mind, without the draught. What made him a 
felon in the purpose of his heart? What degraded 
him into an ignorant heathen, living in the midst of 
a society where the fashions and customs and 
desires of modern civilization serve to inflame the 
natural passions of those who are forbidden to 
share in its opposing influences of refinement and 
religion? If you should urge the prohibition of 
alcoholic drinks because of such an event, attribu- 
ting the event to their having passed the lips of the 
felon— in one word, charging the murder to the 
whiskey — let me ask you what you would say about 
the thousand or thousands of the young men, who 
no doubt, drank on that same day, in the same 
county, and whose reputations are unspotted by 
offence? But — those young men, you will reply, 
did not drink to madness, or inebriation. Then, it 
was not the use of the draught, but its abuse — vol- 
untary and wicked — which, logically, you ought to 
hold up to rebuke, and hold out as a warning. Nor 
is that all. There were many young men that very 
day, who drank when they ought to have abstained, 



91 

who drank foolishly, dangerously, intemperately — 
but who otherwise committed no offence. Why 
were not they, too, felons, or at least peace-break- 
ers? "Why did they not even overstep the bounds 
of apparent, public decorum? Because they had 
culture, means of high enjoyment, were restrained 
by fine influences and social happiness; because 
they were not of w the poor, the ill-taught, the ill- 
conditioned, and in a double sense, the unfortunate." 

When you charge crime to drunkenness, as one 
of the frequent proximate causes of crime; and 
when you charge the sinking of many a man into 
deeper degradation, by abandoning hope, and aban- 
doning himself to drinking as one of the seductive 
forms of sensuality, you are right. But much that 
I hear, leads me to dread the return to our Chris- 
tian community, of that pharisaic morality which 
substitutes a ritual conformity, in matters not 
essential in nature nor by the divine law, for the 
heart of love and the embrace of charity. 

The report of the Secretary, in 1864, avows the 
belief " that no less than three-fourths of what is 
technically called crime among us, is the direct 
result of 'poverty and its attendant evils." A year 
later, alluding to that remark, he adds, w I did not 
mean to be understood that mere lack of money is 



92 

a potent cause of crime. There is a poverty which 
is honorable and conducive to virtue, just as there 
is an affluence which tends to the growth of every 
vice. But that degree of poverty which excludes 
education, which abases and finally destroys self- 
respect, which breeds disease, indolence and vice, 
is conspicuous in every civilized country, and con- 
spicuous as a curse. Of such did the wise man 
say, ? The destruction of the poor is their poverty.' " 

M. Dupuy, the Director of the French prisons, 
in his report for 1863, exhibits a diagram showing 
that, for twenty years, crime against property in 
France has risen and fallen with the price of grain. 

And it is a fact in remarkable confirmation of 
the theory of these gentlemen, that in our own 
Commonwealth, crime diminished not only during 
the years of the rebellion, but was less 
during the very last year, and has not at any- 
time risen to the amount of detected crime existing 
before the war. The number of women committed 
in 1866, was ten per cent, less, and the number of 
children twenty-five per cent, less, than in 1865. 
Not even the flow of bad whiskey with which, on 
the evidence, the whole country is suffering a 
deluge, has been able to counteract the moral 
advantages to the humbler classes gained from the 



93 

pay, bounties, state aid and high wages of the last 
few years. There was a constant accumulation of 
savings, all over the Commonwealth, among per- 
sons in humble life, which is evidence of increased 
comfort, sure to produce greater hopefulness and 
self-respect. 

Still does not poverty owe its own origin often- 
times to drunkenness? Undoubtedly, yes. So also 
is it due often to luxury and idleness originating 
in bad moral training, the sudden acquisition of un- 
earned wealth, leading to habits of self-indulgence 
degenerating into drunkenness and other vices. 
But, drunkenness in our own modern society, end- 
ing in either pauperism or crime, in one of good 
training, grounded in reasonable intelligence, with 
the means of comfort, and supported by the inspi- 
rations of hope, is a rare and exceptional phenome- 
non. Drunkenness is, however, one of several 
causes immediately generating crime and pauper- 
ism — the reduction of which to the minimum, is one 
of the studies and aims of civilization. Yet, the 
effort to reduce them by a war on the material 
abused to produce drunkenness, is scarcely less 
philosophical, than would be an attempt to prevent 
idleness and luxury, by abolishing property and 
imitating the legislation of Sparta. 



94 

I aver that a statute of prohibition, aiming to 
banish from the table of an American citizen by 
pains and penalties, an article of diet, which, a large 
body of the people believe to be legitimate, which 
the law does not even pretend to exclude from the 
category of commercial articles, which in every 
nation, and in some form in all history, has held its 
place among the necessities or the luxuries of 
society, is absurdly weak, or else it is fatal to any 
liberty. Whenever it will cease to be absurdly 
weak, society by the operation of moral causes, 
will have reached a point where it will have become 
useless ; or else it will be fatal to any liberty, since, 
if not useless, but operated and fulfilled by legal 
force, its execution will be perpetrated upon a body 
of subjects in whose abject characters there will be 
combined the essential qualities which are needful 
to cowardice and servility. 

Do you tell me, that no beverage into which 
alcohol enters, used in cooking, or placed upon the 
table, fitly belongs to the catalogue of foods? 

I answer: That is a question of science, which 
neither governor nor legislature has any lawful 
capacity to solve for the people. 



95 

Do you tell me, then, that whether the catalogue 
be expurgated or not, all such food is unwholesome 
and unfit to be safely taken? 

I answer: That is a question of dietetics. And 
it is for the profession of medicine. There is, in 
principle, no odds between proscribing an article of 
diet and prescribing a dose of physic, by authority 
of law. The next step will be to provide for the 
taking of calomel, antimony and Epsom salts by 
Act of the General Court. 

Do you tell me, however, that all such beverages, 
in their most innocent use, involve a certain dan- 
ger; that possibly any one may, probably many, 
and certainly some will, abuse it, and thus abuse 
themselves; and by consequence that all men, as 
matter of prudence, and therefore of duty, ought 
to abstain from and reject it. 

I answer: That is a question of morals, for the 
answer to which we must resort to the Bible, or 
to the Church, or to the teachings of moral philos- 
ophy. The right to answer it at all, or to pretend 
to any opinion upon it, binding the citizen, has 
never been committed by the people, in any free 
government on earth, to the decision of the secular 
power. If the State can pass between the citizen 
and his Church, his Bible, his Conscience and God, 



96 

upon questions of his own personal habits, and 
decide what he shall do, on merely moral grounds, 
then it has authority to invade the domain of 
thought, as well as of private life, and prescribe 
bounds to freedom of conscience. There is no 
barrier, in principle, where the government must 
stop, short of the establishment of a State Church, 
prescribed by law, and maintained by persecution. 

Do you tell me that the using of wine or beer 
as a beverage, however temperately, is of danger- 
ous tendency by reason of its example? Do you 
insist that the temperate use of it by one man may 
be pleaded by another as the occasion and apology 
for its abuse? ' 

I answer: that if the government restrains the 
one man of his own just, rational liberty to regulate 
his private conduct and affairs, in matters innocent 
in themselves, wherein he offends not against 
peace, public decorum, good order, nor the per- 
sonal rights of any, then the government both 
usurps undelegated powers, and assumes to punish 
one man in advance for the possible fault of 
another. The argument that, because one man 
may offend, another must be restrained, is the 
lowest foundation of tyranny, the corner-stone 
of despotism. Liberty is never denied to the 



97 . 

people anywhere, on the ground that liberty is 
denied to be good or right, in itself. The uni- 
versal pretext of every despotism is, that liberty 
is dangerous to society, — that is, that the people 
are unfit to enjoy it. 

Do you tell me that these arguments have a 
tendency indirectly to encourage and defend use- 
less and harmful drinking, and that silence would 
have been better — for the sake of a great and holy 
cause? 

I answer: that He who governs the universe 
and created the nature of man, who made freedom 
a necessity of his development, and the capacity 
to choose between good and evil the crowning dig- 
nity of his reason, knew better than to trust it to 
the expedients of political society. The great and 
holy cause of emancipation from vice and moral 
bondage, is moral, and not political. 

It used to be thought right to burn a man's body 
for the salvation of his soul. It used to be thought 
that to suppress heresy and false teachers deceiving 
the people, was mercy to the heretic and the false 
teacher themselves, while it protected the people 
against perversion and spiritual ruin. The motive 
was not bad, but the philosophy was fatal. The 
better the motive, the sincerer the men, the more 

13 



98 

I 

disastrous was the policy. So now, if dishonest 
and despotic men alone, from love of power and 
not of human welfare, should appeal to this 
machinery, to work, against men's wills, their 
moral renovation, the plan would lose more than 
half its danger. But the bad precedents good 
men establish to-day, in the weakness of their 
faith in better means, had men use to-morrow for 
bad purposes and with worse motives. Meanwhile, 
aiming at compulsory conformity to your creed of 
artificial virtue, the dissentients, even if submissive, 
regarding themselves merely as the victims of a 
dominant asceticism, are made deaf to moral 
teachings, impatient of the preacher, haters of 
his doctrine, and defiant at heart. 

Gentlemen, I maintain the positions I have 
assumed, and enforce them by arguments, because 
I believe those positions to be true, and the argu- 
ments sound. I believe it is safe, expedient and 
wise to stand by the truth. If the Catholic priest, 
uttering the united voice of all the bishops and 
minor clergy of the principal ecclesiastical body 
in Christendom, [see testimony of Rev. James 
A. Healey,] claims no power to declare that to 
be a sin, which Almighty God has not made to 
be a sin, neither can Protestant minister nor pop- 



99 

ular convention. But, I cannot stand in the atti- 
tude of defence. If the doctrine is true; if the 
teachings of science are so; if the argument is 
sound, then I charge back upon all those who, 
in the spirit of Jesuitical philosophy would sacri- 
fice the truth, science and argument, to a supposed 
moral expediency, that they — in the service of moral- 
ity — are unsettling its foundations in the confidence 
of men. 

Do you suppose that the adherents of the Roman 
Catholic Church, or the many thousands of other 
persuasions, whose opinions have been declared 
by the reverend and learned men, belonging to 
Protestant denominations, who have denied 
before this Committee the moral validity of the 
theory of prohibition, will accept the dogmas of 
a Protestant Pope, although indorsed by a self- 
created convention, or enacted by a secular gov- 
ernment? Do you suppose that the people of 
every class and persuasion, — taught by professors 
and practitioners of medical science of every school 
to take wines and beer as tonics, and restoratives, 
and as part of their diet, in illness, in age, or on 
occasions of physical depression — will, in their 
hearts, believe your declaration that they are 
essentially and characteristically poisonous? Do 



100 

you think that the children at our firesides will 
believe that the apostle, (in the unworthy phrase of 
modern discussion,) was a "rummy" and a per- 
verter, when, instead of commanding total absti- 
nence, he enjoined freedom from excess of wine? 
Do you imagine they will forget, that he who made 
the best wine which the guests enjoyed at the 
marriage feast in Galilee, (because He came w eat- 
ing and drinking" while John the Baptist was a 
Nazarite and drank no wine,) was aspersed by the 
Jewish Pharisees as a " wine bibber and a friend of 
publicans and sinners " ? 

The people and the children are not blind to the 
inconsistencies and sophistries of those who claim 
to lead them. They can distinguish the truths of 
the Gospel, and the practical dictates of Reason, 
from the controversial theories of " contentious 
conscientiousness." 

I have a few words to say on the statistics. Many 
gentlemen called by the remonstrants, gave opin- 
ions based on the presumed existence of facts 
which, if not known to exist, can afford no ground 
of opinion. If known, they could have been 
proved, by reference to the ordinary means of sta- 
tistical information. For the purpose of aiding the 
Committee to arrive at the truth, Ave brought the 



101 

evidence of 'such gentlemen to the test of cross- 
examination; in every instance showing that their 
opinions, whenever they seemed at first to have 
been deductions from such facts, were in reality, at 
best, only the guesses of honest, but pre-occupied 
judgments. Now there was one gentleman w r hose 
fame in statistics, in philanthropy and in med- 
icine, had led to his employment by the national 
government to prepare the volume of " Mortality" 
in the series of volumes containing the results of 
the census of 1860 — I mean Dr. Edward Jarvis. 
An ardent opponent of all "ardent spirits," he would 
have been for the remonstrants the safest possible 
witness, had the truth been trustworthy. He was 
the best witness for them to have called, had 
they only desired the best evidence. Besides, I 
had alluded to his work, in my cross-examinations. 
And on the last day of their testimony, one of the 
most intelligent and fair-minded of their witnesses, 
when pressed in cross-examination by the facts 
shown in the statistics of Dr. Jarvis's volume, 
repeatedly called in question the reliability of the 
census reports. The Doctor, (who knew better 
than anybody else,) was in the presence of the 
Committee during the larger part of the sitting. 
He had also been in the hall, with the witnesses, 



102 

through the whole clay on "Wednesday^ and several 
times before. I had early notified the remonstrants 
that I desired, should they call him to the stand, 
to have it done when present myself. 

They used up "Wednesday, and they used up 
Friday; (Thursday I was absent in court;) but 
Dr. Jarvis was kept silent, while very unimportant 
things were put in proof. At last, five minutes 
after the time of the sitting had been exhausted, 
and the chairman had declared an adjournment, Dr. 
Jarvis was called by Rev. Dr. Miner to the stand, 
and the special favor granted, of ten minutes for him 
to make a statement. He read some passages 
from the French treatise of M. Morel, on the 
" Degenerescences de 1'Espece Humaine," about the 
evil effects — exhibited in sterility, impotence, in- 
sanity, idiotcy, and the like — of the " abuse " of alco- 
hol, and what Morel scientifically terms, " chronic 
alcoholism," — touching all which there is no dispute. 
He then produced and put into the case some tab- 
ular matter, not read by us, nor to us; when the 
necessity of clearing the hall for the sitting of the 
House itself, ended the testimony. JS~or was any 
opportunity possible for cross-examination, I 
have no idea that Dr. Jarvis desires anything but 
the truth, of which he is an earnest, toilsome in- 



103 

vestigator, with an enthusiasm for a dry mass of 
figures, which he is always willing to trust, "hit 
where it will." The remonstrants had seemed, on 
the record, to have called Dr. Jarvis, and they had 
seemed to have got us into the position of voluntarily 
omitting to cross-examine. But what Dr. Jarvis 
had to say as a statistician, no one was enabled 
either to hear or .to read. I made no complaint at 
the time. I knew that if I should object to the allow- 
ance of the ten minutes, it would seem ungracious 
to a venerable and learned man, and perhaps be 
otherwise misconceived. Besides, I thought then 
(and so I think now) that the remonstrants, by 
their stroke of apparent finesse, when fully under- 
stood, would only gain a loss. 

When we depart from the simplicity of truth as 
it is found in nature, in the lives of the great 
exemplars of our race, and in revealed religion, 
and go to hewing out for ourselves the broken 
cisterns of merely human ingenuity, we are not 
unlikely to tend to run the experiment into palpa- 
ble extremes, and to try it too often. 

Let me add : in regard to Morel, it appears that 
his dissertation on " chronic alcoholism " is founded 
on observation of 200 cases, and that, of these, 



104 

thirty-five were cases in which the ungovernable 
appetite for excess was caused by disease* 

Of the sheets handed in from Doctor Jarvis, I 
am obliged to confess that it has been impossible 
yet fully to explore their figures or even to decipher 
them. Yet two or three points may be discussed. 

Among the reasons urged why Massachusetts should 
resort to methods which belong to " military necessity" 
rather than civil administration, is, in substance, though 
not in form, the averment of the existence of such a 
necessity. This is a convenient plea, often just, but 
sometimes abused, even in war ; never justifiable in 
peace and when no overwhelming and sudden exigency 
of convulsion, fire, flood, or pestilence returns society 
to its original rights, which organized government may, 
on those supreme occasions, be unable to vindicate 
under the forms of regular procedure. Among the 
proofs of such a necessity to transcend the sphere of 
legislation, break down the precedents, and dis- 
regard the principles of liberty, (as they have 
been understood by men of English blood, ever since 
the Eevolution of 1688,) is the alleged fact of a des- 
perate and frightful mass of insanity, existing in this 
country and occasioned by drink. 

* Traite des Degenerescences, physiques, intellectuelles'et morales de 
l'Espece Humaine, par le Docteur B. A. Morel. Paris, 1857, p. 132. 



105 

Doctor Jarvis is an especial expert in the cure of 
insanity, as well as in the study of its phenomena, 
and its literature. On one of his sheets is a table 
"of patients admitted into hospitals for the insane, 
caused by intemperance." This table states that, of 
all the patients received into all the hospitals in the 
United States down to 1856, the causes of their disease 
as reported are known in 14,935 cases. The cause of 
the insanity of 1,536 is reported to have been " intem- 
perance." That number is the aggregate of known 
alcoholic insanity, out of all the aggregate population 
existing during a series of years running from 1833 
to 1856, and that too, making no allowance for 
recommittals of the same persons, who must in some 
instances be enumerated twice. It gives a gross ratio of 
1,028 cases of "insanity caused by intemperance," 
out of each 10,000 reported cases. Now, let us com- 
pare this result with the figures given on the same 
page, showing the experience of the different hospitals 
and different sections of country relatively to each 
other. I do this for the purpose of learning whether 
in those parts of the country where prohibitory legis- 
lation prevails, any apparent diminution of this kind 
of insanity has arisen. Also, I do it to learn whether in 
those parts where liquors are plenty and cheap, this 

insanity is proportionally increased, by the tables. 
u 



106 

Also, to test the accuracy of the reasoning of the phy- 
sicians, the friends of patients and others, to whom we 
are indebted for the statements in the individual cases 
assigning the insanity of patients to this cause. I say 
the " reasoning" because, while I do not deny their 
truthfulness, I am not so sure of their accuracy in 
correctly discriminating between apparent causes and 
real ones, between causes immediate and causes 
remote. 

Remember that the grand ratio in the Union, 
by these statistics, is 1,028 to 10,000 — a trifle over 
one in ten. But, in Ohio, (whence came a witness 
for the remonstrants, to say how much his people 
longed for the legislation of Maine and Massachu- 
setts, and New England generally, against the , sale 
of alcoholics,) Dr. Jarvis's table shows only 505 out 

of 10,000, or a trifle less than one-half the average 
ratio of intemperate insanity in the country. Com- 
pare the State of Ohio with Massachusetts. The 
returns for Boston, Dr. Jarvis's table gives as show- 
ing 2,318 out of 10,000, or more than twice the 
average ratio of the Union; Northampton Hospital, 
2,168, Taunton Hospital, 2,379, and Worcester 
Hospital vibrating at different periods from 1,110, up 
to 1,832. Go to Philadelphia, and the ratio found in 
the whole period returned is 1,183. The highest 



107 

ratio there was from the years 1856 to 1866, when it 
was at the rate of 1,310 to the 10,000. The average 
ratio of all the Pennsylvania Hospitals is 1,064 to 
the 10,000 ; while Harrisburg Hospital presents a 
ratio of only 547 to the 10,000. 

This table then proves, if it proves anything at all, 
that " insanity from intemperance," as it is returned, 
prevails more in the very head-quarters of prohibitory 
legislation and principles, than it does in the whiskey 
region of the West and the North-West, where, before 
the war-tax, whiskey could have been bought at the 
distilleries for a quarter of a dollar the gallon, and 
where also the manufacture of wine from the native 
grape has grown to be an important business of the 
people, and " prohibition " is known only by name. 

I will admit, however, that prohibition, as such, may 
be excluded from the argument. It has really 
existed in New England, only in name. And, it is 
fair to give the remonstrants the benefit of the fact in 
the argument. But it is true, that a large degree of 
abstinence, even to totality, has existed in New England, 
in fact, ever since these hospital records began to be 
made. How shall we account then for the fact, which 
the remonstrants have themselves thus proved, that 
Massachusetts, admitted to be so far ahead of Pennsyl- 
vania and Ohio, in technical or ritual temperance, 



108 

suffers from twice to four times as much, from 
insanity caused by intemperance, as they do % I sup- 
pose the truth to be, that the real or primary cause of 
much of the insanity of men falling into intemperate 
habits, and reported as made crazy by those habits, could 
be traced to anterior causes. These, distracting, break- 
ing down, weakening and disheartening the man, in 
mind and body, left him to topple over into drunk- 
enness, in which condition he first disclosed occasion 
for anxiety to his friends, and from which, by the 
rapid development of the undiscerned, though earlier, 
malady, he descended rapidly into some form of posi- 
tive, visible insanity, of which drunkenness, as the last 
antecedent, became the apparent cause. On this 
point I might content myself with merely citing the 
testimony of Dr. Morel himself in his very treatise* 
which was quoted by Dr. Jarvis on other points. By 
means of drinking, it became known, for the first 
time, that the patient was crazy at all. And, this 

* Traite des Degenerescences, etc., by Dr. Morel, page 133, note ; where 
the learned author says : " Les debuts de l'alienateon mentale offrent une 
telle complexite, qu'il est bien difficile aux parents de se fixer sur l'influence 
principale sous laquelle se developpe le mal. II arrive bien souvent que 
telle cause qu'ils regardent comme efficiente, n'est souvent qu'un effet 
secondaire." 

"The beginnings of mental alienation present such complexity that it is 
extremely difficult even for relatives of the patient to make sure of the 
principal influence under which the malady develops. It often occurs 
that what they regard as the efficient cause, is in reality only a secondary 
effect." 



109 

was the true history of the tragic case of one of 
the most brilliant men, by nature, I have ever known. 
But how does this theory account for the 
phenomenon of apparently drunken insanity here, 
in excess of such insanity there 1 My answer is, 
that from the causes I have already indicated, there 
is more insanity, in the aggregate, among our people, 
in proportion to numbers, than there is in the 
other sections. And the mistake being often made, 
of supposing drink to be its cause, where, in a large 
class of cases, it is rather the antecedent than the 
cause, we are, therefore, reported to have twice as 
much mental disease created by drink, when in 
fact we consume very much less drink to create it. 

Let me give a further proof. The whole number of 
deaths recorded as caused by " Insanity," occurring in 
the years 1859, '60, found in the volume on " Mor- 
tality" prepared by Dr. Jarvis himself, and printed by 
order of Congress, was 452 in all the States. There 
were other insane persons who died, but whose 
deaths were immediately caused by other diseases 
superinduced. But of those who died from insan- 
ity, the proportion was twice as great in the north- 
eastern as in the north-western districts, twice as 
great as in the south-west, more than twice as 
great as in the south-east, and more than twice as 



110 

great as in the tier of States comprising Ohio, 
Indiana, Illinois, Iowa and Kansas, and a great deal 
larger than in other districts, except in California. 
It is plain, therefore, that insanity is a disease, 
which, in its various manifestations, appears in larger 
ratio, and is fatal to more people, in the north-east, 
than in most other portions of the country. The 
excess in California is truly ascribed by Dr. Jarvis, 
(on page 243 of the Census Volume of " Mor- 
tality,") to " the excitement and oppressive anxieties, 
and the great and sudden changes of fortune 
among many of the people." Applying the same 
rule to the north-east, we find the cause of our greater 
ratio of insanity, in the commercial fortuities, the 
speculative adventures, the hurrying, crowded, 
excited, anxious habits of manufacturing and com- 
mercial cities, the excessive nervous exposure of 
artists, poets, lawyers, and all persons of overtasked 
brains, distinguishing our civilization. Insanity, 
indeed, is peculiarly " a feature of developing civiliza- 
tion."* It is thus described by our own Board of State 
Charities, and with learned emphasis. Besides, the bad 
sanitary condition of narrow lanes and alleys, where 
certain classes abide and die before their time, among 

* Second Annual Eeport of the Massachusetts Board of State Charities, 
p. ciii. (Mass. Pub. Doc. 1865, No. 19.) 



Ill 

the denser populations, piles up another agony in the 
accumulation of human woe, of which madness is one 
of the mysterious signs. Thus our sum total of insanity 
is relatively greater than for example, that of the West. 
But this excess of our own insanity compared with pop- 
ulation, furnishes no reason why the peculiar form of 
madness incident to drunkenness should be still fur- 
ther increased and be twice as common in proportion 
to our whole volume of insanity. But, if this 
appearance is not merely superficial ; if it is real ; and 
if in Massachusetts, in fact, more than twice as many 
people go mad from drink as in other places known 
to be less abstinent, I leave the unexplained phe- 
nomenon to be disposed of by others. I believe the 
explanation to be, (and these statistics concur in 
proving it,) that drunkenness is oftentimes a man- 
ifestation of independently existing mania, mistaken, 
by superficial observation, for the cause. 

These leaves of Dr. Jarvis have still further value. 
They confirm, by the weight of his opinion, the tables 
of mortality in the Census. It had been contended on 
behalf of the remonstrants, that such returns could 
deserve little trust ; that the deaths from " delirium 
tremens" and from " intemperance," and from " insan- 
ity," as returned and tabulated, could not be true. 
But Dr. Jarvis himself exhibits now just such tables, 



112 

which can be drawn only from such sources. It had 
been gravely urged by one of the strongest and most 
intelligent of their witnesses, that the mortality from 
intemperance was fifty thousand a year in the United 
States ! And, when I called attention to the proof, 
that the deaths from " delirium tremens" were in 1860 
but 575, that those from "intemperance" were 
returned as 931 in all, that the mortality from 
" diseases of the brain " (regarded by their own 
physiological authorities as the great seat of the 
diseases generated by alcohol,) was returned at only 
5,726 in the aggregate, and when I vainly begged to 
know how the estimate of the witness was made, my 
facts and figures were received with incredulity. Now 
the whole sum of mortality in the whole country, from 
all causes, was less than 374,000 in 1860, of which 
number by the theory of the witness in question, about 
one in seven was due to drink. But, one of the leaves 
presented by Dr. Jarvis, on the stand, shows that, 
even in Boston, (bad as she is represented by the pro- 
hibitionists,) in the dark decade from the year 1820 to 
1830, the mortality was but 309 from intemperance, 
to 10,000 of all known causes, or about three deaths 
from intemperance, out of 100 from all causes. And 
it also exhibits a descent, during the last five and 
forty years, from even that ratio, until during the fifteen 



113 

years ending with the year 1865, there was a ratio of 
85.9 to the 10,000, or less than one to one hundred. 
And this is Boston, bearing as she must, not only the 
sins of her own people, but of strangers, of a large 
mass • of entirely exceptional persons, dying under 
exceptional circumstances, and not representing at all 
the average health or the general sobriety. 

In Lowell. Dr. Jarvis's tables show that in the decade 
ending with 1851, the mortality from intemperance 
was but 56.9 to the 10,000 deaths, or little more than 
half of one to an hundred ; and that, as in Boston, 
so there also, without enforcing prohibition, but by the 
moral self-restraint of the people, that species of 
mortality has still further diminished and has for 
the past fifteen years, been at less than half the 
former ratio, or about one-quarter of one death 
from intemperance to one hundred deaths from 
all causes. The same tables show, that taking 
all the counties but Suffolk, out of 81,473 deaths 
from all known causes, during the years 1861 
to 1864, there were 298 from intemperance, or the 
ratio of 36.5 to the 10,000, less than four-tenths of 
one to the hundred deaths. And the seven counties 
of Barnstable, Berkshire, Franklin, Hampshire, Hamp- 
den, Dukes and Nantucket, from an aggregate of 
113 deaths from intemperance, in the decade of 1841 

15 



114 

to 1850, out of 24,684 from all known causes, fell 
down, in the next decade, to 123 deaths from intem- 
perance, out of 39,991 from all causes. The former 
decade gave 45.8 to the 10,000, and the latter but 
30.7 to the 10,000., 

And all this proof of the conquering power of ideas, 
of reason and moral sentiment, to reform abuses, has 
accumulated during a time when the use is more 
general, and when the cause of true temperance is 
demoralized by a law on the statute book, constantly 
defied. 

Accidents in 1860, from the discharge of fire-arms 
alone, destroyed 741 lives ; railway accidents, 599 ; 
accidental poison, 950 ; while the aggregate of acci- 
dental causes was fatal to 18,090 persons, an army 
corps in number. Even " old age " which is intended 
to include only those who die from exhaustion of vital 
force from protracted use of life, without any disease 
or organic lesion — attended 4,899 men and 5,988 
women, or 10,887 in all, to the last repose of our 
poor humanity. 

Figures may be thought to be apparently in favor 
of the health and sobriety of the country populations 
as against the city. But it should be observed that 
the progress of sobriety has been as great in the city 



115 

as in the country, notwithstanding the exceptional 
disadvantages of crowded quarters and floating classes. 
• I must afford time for one proof that the great body 
of young and middle-aged men in Boston, in spite of 
all the supposed temptations of the metropolis, are not 
behind their rural neighbors in the physical qualities 
of manhood. Of the 29,194 men drafted by the 
United States in the summer of 1863, and of the 
9,830 who volunteered under the stimulus of high 
bounties and the short term of service, during the last 
eight months of the war, being 39,024 in all, there 
were rejected by the surgeons, 14,827. These two 
bodies are fairly representative — the first because raised 
on an equal draft, the second because stimulated by 
the same enthusiasms, and by State and town boun- 
ties, both large and similar. (No calculation covering 
the aggregate volume of physical examinations and 
the results, in this Commonwealth, during the whole 
war, is accessible.) 

The number of these men, drafted or recruited and 
examined, in the two representative districts to which 
Boston belongs, (viz. : the third and fourth,) was 
12,741, and the number in the other eight districts 
was 26,283. Of those examined in the two Boston 
districts, the number rejected by the surgeons was 
3,946, or 310 to each thousand examined; while, of 



116 

those examined in the other eight districts, the rejec- 
tions were 10,881, or 414 to each thousand, — thus 
exhibiting about three-fourths as many rejections to 
the thousand in the Boston districts as are found in 
the residue of the Commonwealth. 

Mr. Chairman : The proof is clear that neither 
mortality nor insanity, nor any of the fatal exhibitions 
of intemperance, bad as they are, afford any gronnd 
for panic, or " military necessity in legislation." But 
one of the advocates before this Committee, and many 
of the witnesses, have declared they meant " to put it 
through" to " overcome obstacles," to " remember 
that Massachusetts can do whatever she undertakes." 
Another advocate, perhaps the most eloquent of 
them all, and not the least imprudent, has declared 
in public, that they intend " to exhaust the inge- 
nuity of the Yankee mind" in devising measures 
to compel the due subordination of their opponents. 

But, if gentlemen believe that a standing menace, a 
perpetual sneer, the denial of sincerity or conscien- 
tiousness, the positive accusation of being moved by 
appetite, or by gain, the habitual affectation of supe- 
riority, both of rights and of character (with which 
these petitioners, their advocates and witnesses have 
been met and opposed by persons on the stand and off 
of it, by public speech, and through the " prohibi- 



117 

tory " press) will ultimately avail, when the results 
of this hearing shall have been spread before " the 
Yankee mind" — they have misconceived its intelli- 
gence, and its fairness, the spirit of liberty, refinement 
and progress. 

Whenever you begin this work of enforced con- 
formity, there are perils in your way little imagined. 
It is of no use to beg the question, by the short 
method of stigmatizing opponents as criminals, or as 
upholders of criminality. There is now proved to 
be — what certain gentlemen affected to doubt before — 
a powerful, convinced, intellectual, revered and noble 
body of people, numerically strong, and not sur- 
passed by any, in aught that yields weight, dignity 
and influence, denying the dogmas of the prohibi- 
tionists, challenging the philosophy of their move- 
ment, the fitness of their methods, their consistency 
with liberty, with progress, and with the ultimate 
good. A denunciatory harangue, impugning the 
character of a private citizen, or the motives of a 
sworn and responsible magistrate, will not longer avail 
against this array. If, against the judgment of the 
best men you insist on this coercion, and trample on 
convictions as well as rights, let me remind you that 
the same argument of necessity may be used to strike 
where now you little dream. Stay a moment. Take 



118 

• 

this very illustration of insanity again. The census 
report* gives a table prepared by Dr. Butler, of the 
" Hartford Retreat," exhibiting the whole number of 
cases in four leading hospitals, in which the causes 
of insanity have been noted. There were 7,591 cases, 
in all. Of these, 2,253 were found due to " ill 
health," and 812 to " intemperance." Thus there 
was found nearly three times as much statistical 
proof of a necessity to take under guardianship the 
whole course of domestic life and personal habit, 
physical and moral, for the protection of the com- 
munity against suffering from the madness of sick 
people, as against that of the other class. Nor is 
that all. If " intemperance " caused the madness of 
812, so " religious excitement" came next in the order, 
and crazed 740 more. What will you do with these \ 
You admit that you have no right to restrain or appoint 
the use of stimulants by the citizen. He may use 
them in his diet, as well as for his medicine, if he 
can. But, you will prevent his getting them, by for- 
bidding .any one to sell them, unless as a public 
agent. And you will direct the public agent to make 
inquisition of the use intended, and to, refuse then^ 
if wanted for a dietetic purpose. Thus, by indirection, 

* See "Introduction," to Volume on "Population," of the Census 
Report, of 18G0, p. lxxxix. 



119 

— not deemed honorable as between gentlemen, not 
deemed fair dealing as between merchants, not per- 
mitted by the Gospel, which enjoins that your " yea" 
shall mean yea, and your " nay " shall mean nay, — 
your law aims to do, and its supporters make a 
virtue of trying to do, what it purports to omit, what 
it pretends to avoid. It, in fact, undertakes to get 
into the household, control the domestic economy 
and the diet of the citizen, by a sumptuary law 
artfully worded. The supreme court may not be able 
to reach and overrule it. But, there is "a higher 
law," by which it is inevitably rejudged. 

If the legislature can do thus, then why not also lay 
hands on the promoters of "religious excitement % " 
Do you reply that people have the right to think 
according to conscience, on religion % True ; and so 
you say they have a right to select their own diet. 
Suppose you compare the number of people made 
crazy by " religious excitement " with the number of 
sinners returned as converted, and on comparing them 
you find the ratio of that insanity greater than the 
ratio alcoholic insanity bears to the aggregate of tem- 
perate drinkers, what is to hinder the application of 
your argument from " military necessity?" Why not 
admit the right to think, but deny to some classes the 
dangerous right to preach? Does the constitution 



120 

hinder % Then why not try " the ingenuity of the 
Yankee mind," by agitating to amend the constitution, 
to rid us of such an evil \ Some of the denominations 
might not object, if they are not wedded to the idea of 
liberty. It might be found that the confessional, the 
absolution, and the sacraments of salvation, offered by 
the Church of Rome, give such peace of mind that 
its ministers prevent insanity and create none. It 
might be urged that the denominations styled " Lib- 
eral" neither alarm nor console, and therefore, if 
they do no good, do no harm. It might be set up 
that Calvinism distracts the understanding, scares the 
imagination, and leaves an awful doubt forever hang- 
ing over the tremendous problem of election and 
reprobation ; that Arminianism is exciting, noisy, and 
guilty of placing an overwhelming responsibility on 
the sinner's mind, since it leaves everlasting issues 
to depend on his working out his own salvation. 
Romanism, then, together with the " Liberals," might 
be left by the law in substantially undisputed posses- 
sion of the field — as the " State agency " appointed to 
preach down insanity and lower the taxes now wrung 
from our pockets to support 740 people a year driven 
mad by religious emotions and measures which they 
could not " assimilate " nor " digest." 



121 

But, suppose, for the moment, that our part of 
the immense trade in alcoholics, — of which ninety 
million gallons were manufactured in this country in 
1860, — could be taken by legislative machinery out 
of commerce and put into politics, so that the gover- 
nor, or his agent, the liquor commissioner, should be 
the only lawful wholesale dealer, besides the import- 
ers selling only their original packages, which could 
never be broken for sale, nor sold again, unless by 
the commissioner. And, for all the myriad uses of 
our diversified industry into which alcohol enters, (as 
it does enter in almost every conceivable way through 
manufactures and the arts, being found at last in solid, 
as well as fluid forms, in our lights, in the gases, and 
in most medicines, at some stage or other of their 
preparation,) suppose for the moment that only the 
local agents of the government should actually sell it 
by retail at all. Remember, that there is an actual 
demand in the whole country, by the public taste, good 
and bad, for at least forty million gallons to drink. 
Alongside of this demand, in ordinary times, there is, 
with our present population and under wise taxation, 
a demand for some fifty million gallons more for other 
uses agreed to be legitimate. When politics have 
got the monopoly of the latter business, they will 
not wait long before grasping at the former. The 

16 



122 

business, (for ends acknowledged legitimate,) will ' 
then have swollen in the hands of the commissioner 
and his friends, — who manufacture and import for 
him, who sell or consign to him, to whom he is 
indebted, or under obligations, — to the proportions 
of a vast overshadowing monopoly, of which the 
profits would belong to a few, represented in every 
hamlet, on every hillside and river bank of Massa- 
chusetts, by an army of local agents in correspond- 
ence and in fatal relations with the " head centre " 
of the monopoly at Boston, who would " pull the 
wires" felt in every town and district caucus, and 
would " log-roll " with every similar enterprise aimed 
at the subversion of local and personal independence. 
Strong in the power of such a gigantic " machine " 
invented in a spasm of " Yankee ingenuity," impu- 
dent with ill-gotten wealth, and bloated by greedy 
ambition, — like the two daughters of the horse-leech, 
(in the Proverbs) they will perpetually cry "give! 
give ! " Do you believe in the virtuous self-denial of 
such an unnatural alliance between trade and politics, 
consummated in defiance of the principles of political 
economy, maintained by subverting ancient safeguards 
of liberty ; created by a statute which — professed to be 
made in the interest of a high moral testimony against 
the sale of even wines not less than spirits distilled — 



123 

allows the manufacture of New England Rum by the 
wholesale, to be sent abroad to all the earth, and 
among our missionaries to the heathen, without hin- 
drance or rebuke? I warn honest gentlemen, who 
desire that the traffic in these dangerous and seductive, 
yet needful and indispensable liquids, shall be kept 
within the reach of regulation, wherever order and 
decorum demand the intervention of government, and 
the government can rightly intervene, — I warn them 
that your machinery may be found, at last, more pow- 
erful than the inventors. You may yet find, that after 
political corruption shall have subsidized the party 
leaders, and demoralized the party, dedicated by its 
name, and consecrated by its life to Republican liberty, 
it will reveal itself in all the hideous proportions of 
the Devil, though now wearing a shining robe. I fore- 
warn you of the day surely coming, unless you recede, 
when the monopoly you are striving to create, greedy 
for more gain and more power, anxious to increase 
and not to diminish its sales, will " run the machine " 
in the interest of unlimited consumption by our own 
people, as well .as by the heathen. When that day 
comes, it will be found that your machinery, the 
motive power of which will be a stream of Rum, 
swollen by all the affluents of commerce, will have 
a wheel large enough for the stream, and that the 



124 

whole stream will be turned on the wheel. I pray 
you to avoid trying the fatal experiment to see 
whether in that day, and until a new revolution shall 
break the chain you now are forging, Massachusetts 
will own the Trade in Rum, or the Monopolists of the 
Trade will own Massachusetts, selling what they 
please, as they please, to whom they please, limiting 
their business only by the fatality of their beverages. 
The only safety of u the machine " is found in the fact 
that it never will be made to work. 

We propose, Mr. Chairman, a scheme which will 
liberate the Commonwealth, and give scope to the 
religious and virtuous encouragement, whether of 
Temperance or of Abstinence. Enact a law leaving 
the wholesale liquor trade with commerce, where it 
belongs. Provide for assay and inspection, to protect 
the people from imposition. If you can allow men 
to distil liquors for wholesale, for the uses of arts and 
manufactures, as now you do, there is no pretext for 
interference with the product of importation. Permit 
the municipalities to license taverners to furnish 
to their guests, in their rooms, . or on their 
tables with their meals, whatever beverages, as 
well as whatever meat, they demand and the 
markets afford, according to the customs of social 
and domestic life. Allow them also to license vie- 



125 

tuallers to sell fermented beverages, in like manner, 
with the meals of their guests, and allow grocers to 
retail in packages conveniently small for domestic 
or culinary use and for employment in manufactures 
and the arts ; and, in the name of ordinary fairness 
and common reason, grant the petition of the College 
of Pharmacy. 

Having adopted a scheme which looks to the dis- 
continuance of public tippling places, or saloons, 
or bars, of all kinds, surround the licensees by 
such police regulations as may be, to restrain that 
abuse. Your regulation of the retail trade will then 
securely repose on the clear social right to maintain 
order and public decorum, endangered by bar-rooms 
and tippling shops, where dangerous and seductive 
beverages are offered neither as medicine, nor as diet, 
to the chance crowds of the hour, tempted by each 
other to drink without appetite, to linger without 
motive, and to revel without enjoyment, 

" Where laughter is not mirth, nor thought the mind, . 
Nor words a language, nor even men mankind." 

If you fear that local influences may indulge indi- 
viduals at the risk of the public, then give to the 
judges of the Court of Probate and of the Superior 
Court, sitting in Chambers, jurisdiction on summary 



126 

hearing, upon sworn complaint of any selectman or 
alderman, or of the Constable of the Commonwealth, 
to annul any license which the municipal authorities 
refuse to annul, on proof to the judge's satisfaction 
that its holder has broken the law or the conditions 
of his license. 

Do this fairly, with no effort to reduce the people 
to inconvenient straits in the pursuit of what in their 
own judgment they need. 

Under the forms of republican legislation, do not, 
in the short-sighted service of morality without Faith, 
seek to play either the tyrant or the pedagogue. 

In the words of John Quincy Adams, whose austere 
virtue and greatness made him for years the represent- 
ative statesman of New England, uttered in address- 
ing the Temperance Society of Norfolk County, five 
and twenty years ago : — 

" Forget not \Ipray you] the rights of personal freedom* 
* * * Self-government is the foundation of all our polit- 
ical and social institutions, and it is by self-government alone 
that the law of temperance can be enforced. * * * Seek 
not to enforce upon [your brother,] by legislative enact- 
ment, that virtue which he can possess only by the dictate 
of his own conscience and the energy of his own will." 

Abiding by such principles, you will put an end to 
the antagonism between the government, and the peo- 



127 

pie who consume. You will have preserved your own 
dignity, undertaken your own duties, and recognized 
their rights. With all the methods and forces of the 
present laws, and of the existing decisions, at your 
command for the punishment of those who sell with- 
out license, or in breach of one, you will stand in 
a position a hundred-fold stronger than you do 
to-day, or than you ever stood before. Recognizing 
the retail trade in liquors as having an exceptional 
side, and therefore requiring a certain police super- 
vision which every town may not desire to undertake, 
we do not ask it to be forced upon any town against 
its will. While the means of purchase for certain 
uses are furnished through the agency, and while 
the competition of other towns exists, and the power 
to institute the same competition exists there also, 
a given town may prefer to exclude it. The fatal 
monopoly I have described will then be impossible ; 
and the right of the citizen will be preserved to buy 
someivhere in the Commonwealth those things he 
needs, in his own judgment, for his family and for 
himself. 

It is puerile to inveigh against this plan, as making 
the " criminal laws of the Commonwealth " subject 
to municipal interference. That is substituting an 
adjective for an argument. These laws are only 



128 

" criminal " because they are made so, or called so. 
They are properly police regulations (often essentially 
municipal,) concerning the distribution of certain 
articles of merchandise, universally admitted to have 
their proper uses, needful to be bought and sold, but 
liable to abuse. One breaking those regulations is 
liable to indictment or complaint. In that sense, 
they are criminal laws. But, there always have 
been other laws, the violation of which subjects 
one to criminal procedure, as for misdemeanor, just 
as these do, which are subordinated to municipal 
administration, and which even owe their very being 
to the will of the respective cities and towns. 

But, do you profess that these prohibitory laws 
were enacted in the exercise of your best discretion ; 
and that in your judgment the case for a change has 
not been made out ? I then beg to meet that position 
by the counter position taken by some of the ablest 
and wisest men in Massachusetts, in testimony before 
this Committee, denying the right of government thus to 
pass into the domestic and private sphere. 

If there is a man born to speak the English tongue, 
who combines high integrity, great attainments, prac- 
tical wisdom and theoretical statesmanship, with faith 
in, and devotion to, free government, and the elevation 
of the humble, that man — one of the truest friends of 



129 

America in the Old World — is John Stuart Mill. 
And thus he wrote : — 

" There are in our own day, gross usurpations upon the 
liberty of private life actually practised, and still greater 
ones threatened, with some expectation of success ; and 
opinions proposed which assert an unlimited right in the 
public not only to prohibit by law everything which it thinks 
wrong, but in order to get at what it thinks wrong, to pro- 
hibit any number of things which it admits to be innocent. 

" Under the name of preventing intemperance, the people 
of one English colony, and of nearly half the United States, 
have been interdicted by law from making any use whatever 
of fermented drinks, except for medical purposes ; for pro- 
hibition of their sale is in fact, as it is intended to be, 
prohibition of their use. * * * The infringement com- 
plained of is not on the liberty of the seller, but on that of 
the buyer and consumer ; since the State might just as well 
forbid him to drink wine, as purposely make it impossible for 
him to obtain it. The secretary, however, [of the English 
" Alliance "] says, ' I claim, as a citizen, a right to legislate 
whenever my social rights are invaded by the social act of 
another.' And now for the definition of these ' social 
rights.' ' If anything invades my social rights, certainly 
the traffic in strong drink does. It destroys my primary 
right of security, by constantly creating and stimulating 
social disorder. It invades my right of equality, by deriving 
a profit from the creation of a misery I am taxed to support. 
It impedes my right to free moral and intellectual develop- 
ment, by surrounding my path 4 with dangers, and by weak- 
ening and demoralizing society, from which I have a right 
to claim mutual aid and intercourse.' A theory of ' social 
17 



130 

rights/ the like of which probably never before found its 
way into distinct language, being nothing short of this, that 
it is the absolute social right of every individual that every 
other individual shall act in every respect exactly as he 
ought ; that whosoever fails thereof in the smallest partic- 
ular, violates my social right, and entitles me to demand 
from the legislature the removal of the grievance. So 
monstrous a principle is far more dangerous than any single 
interference with liberty ; there is no violation of liberty 
which it would not justify ; it acknowledges no right to any 
freedom whatever except perhaps to that of holding opinions 
in secret, without ever disclosing them."* 

I appeal also to William von Humboldt, the friend 
of Schiller and of Goethe, a statesman, a scholar, an 
ambassador of Prussia, a minister of State, who re-or- 
ganized public instruction and gave to the Prussian 
system much of the eminence it enjoys, whose forecast 
attempted to consolidate Germany against the first 
Napoleon, as Bismarck has, more than a half century 
later, consolidated it against Napoleon III., and of 
whom it was said by Talleyrand, that there were not 
three men in Europe of his ability : — 

" The State may content itself with exercising the most 
watchful vigilance on every unlawful project, and defeat- 
ing it before it has been put into execution : or, advanc- 
ing further, it may prohibit actions which are harmless in 
themselves, but which tempt to the commission of crime, or 

*Mill on Liberty, pp. 170-73. 



131 

afford opportunities for resolving upon criminal actions. 
This latter policy, again, tends to encroach on the liberty of 
the citizens ; manifests a distrust on the part of the State 
which not only operates hurtfully on the character of the 
citizens, but goes to defeat the very end in view. * * * All 
that the State may do, without frustrating its own end, and 
without encroaching on the freedom of its citizens, is, there- 
fore, restricted to the former course ; that is, the strictest 
surveillance of every trangression of the law, either already 
committed or only resolved on ; and as this cannot properly 
be callea preventing the causes of crime, I think I may safely 
assert that this prevention of criminal actions is wholly 
foreign to the State's proper sphere of activity.* 

One of the latest and best expositions of the 
w Rationale of Government and Legislation " is 
found in a recent volume bearing that title, by 
Lord Wrottesley, in which, without pretension to 
novelty of reasoning, (which would, perhaps, be a 
demerit,) he has presented the results arrived at by 
the best modern writers on the philosophy of 
government. 

The following propositions so clearly express 
the conclusions of reason and experience, that I 
am prepared to adopt and to proclaim them as 
the voice of authority. 

" First. Laws should never be passed which either can- 
not be executed, or of which the execution is so difficult 

* Sphere and Duties of Government, (W. v. Humboldt,) p. 171. 



132 

that the temptation to neglect their observance is likely to 
surmount the fear of the punishment. 

" Second. Laws should never be passed forbidding acts 
which, in the opinion of a large proportion of the educated 
members of the community, are in themselves innocent. 

" Third. Laws should not generally be passed which, 
though good in themselves, either too much anticipate public 
opinion, or are hostile to the deliberately-formed sentiments 
of a large majority of the population of any country. 

u Fourth. No attempt should be made to reform the moral 
conduct of society by the enactments of positive law, —that 
is, to make men good and virtuous by Act of Parliament.' ' 

The venerable and reverend Doctor Leonard With- 
ington, in the dawn of this attempt at enforced 
conformity, sounded the note of remonstrance, with 
prophetic wisdom. 

" I desire to bear my solemn testimony, and to say 
that though I have seen frequent attempts, I never knew 
any good to come from such legislation. I have seen men 
exasperated by it but never reformed. So it ever has been, 
and so it ever will be, until nature itself is changed. I 
was in Connecticut when attempts were made to enforce 
the observance of the Sabbath by law. I saw hypocrisy, 
power, passion, haughtiness, indignation, force, resistance, 
commands, threats, cursing; but I saw no promotion of 
meekness among Christians or repentance among sinners. 
The contest was long and the fruits were bitter. Long did 
it take to teach the sober part of the community a simple 
truth. WJiat the law could not do, in that it was weak 
through the flesh, God, sending' his own Son in the likeness 



133 

of sinful flesh, and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh, that 
the righteousness of the law might be fulfilled in us who walk 
not after the flesh, but after the spirit." 

" If any person can devise a plan for prohibitory legis- 
lation on the sale of intoxicating drinks, not involving 
the greatest inconsistency even in the very scheme, then I 
will acknowledge he has done what surpasses the utmost 
flights of my imagination. This very plan must be a square 
wheel made to roll. But how absurd it is to expect success 
in the execution, when you cannot even devise consistency 
in the design! You launch a vessel full of holes and 
expect her not to sink." 

" Remember that some are drunkards because they are 
poor ; some because they are idle ; some because they 
are disappointed ; some because they are ignorant ; some 
from an unhappy nervous system ; and all because they 
are not Christians. Reflect that there are indirect as well 
as direct efforts to oppose this evil ; and that sometimes 
the indirect efforts are the most effectual. Is a man idle, 
endeavor to employ him ; is he ignorant, instruct him ; is he 
disappointed, point him to the true source of consolation ; 
and, above all things, beware how you lord it over his faults, 
or play the Pharisee over his vices. Recollect that intem- 
perance is seldom an insulated vice ; it grows up in wide 
combinations ; and you are never fitted to engage in the 
subject of reforming it until you have sounded the depths 
from which it springs." 

It is urged by many good men that spirits and wines 
are so alluring, that health and morals require teetotal- 
ism as the only safeguard. That while there is evi- 



134 

dence, by which many men otherwise trustworthy are 
convinced, in favor of a certain, temperate, dietetic use 
by some people, yet the moral dangers to the mass are 
such that teetotalism ought not only to be univer- 
sally volunteered, but that it ought to receive the vin- 
dication of the Statute book, and the moral support of 
the legislature. 

The whole argument involves one of the oldest of 
human errors; so entirely human that it has no 
shadow of countenance from the religion of the New 
Testament. This world, in which while in the body 
we must abide, and this body in which the spirit 
dwells, have been felt by many philosophers and moral- 
ists, both Christian and heathen, to work a sad impris- 
onment of the celestial spirit. The immaculate purity 
of the spirit, soiled by any indulgence of the gross 
and material body, recedes from all human passion, 
and oftentimes from all intercourse with this tempting, 
dangerous, material world, to which alone, in the 
temptation of a simple fruit, hanging on one of the 
trees of Eden, is due our whole experience of woe 
and the awful mystery of evil. The Church has 
always been tolerant, the Church of Rome has some- 
times been too indulgent, of this mysticism ; while 
some of the Protestant sects, as well as of the societies 
in the Roman Church, have made it their vital princi- 



135 

pie. But it had its original expression in oriental phi- 
losophy, not in Christianity, nor even in Judaism. 

When our Saviour came to the Jews, He found 
them mainly in these sects or divisions, — the Phar- 
isees and the Sadducees. The latter, relatively small, 
maintained the law as written by Moses, denying the 
traditions of the Elders. They were rich, educated 
and influential, but cold, hard and unspiritual. The 
Pharisees were devoted to their religion, professed to 
live meanly, to despise delicacies, to venerate the 
Elders. But many of them, with ostentatious prayers, 
sacrificed the heart of humanity on the altar of 
ceremonious and hollow sanctity. Besides these, were 
the Essenes. They were very few, and were sincere, 
but narrow. 

Doubtless recruited from the sect of Pharisees 
they held rather to their general views, which had 
an ascetic tendency. But, in a spirit of devout, self- 
denying, mystic yearning after God, they sought 
him in the ecstasies of contemplation, through exile, 
poverty and want; instead of facing the world, bear- 
ing its social burdens, risking its evils, temptations 
and woes. Although there were many observances 
pertaining to the flesh, ritually imposed upon the Jew, 
including many dietetic limitations, there was in the 
law of Moses no prohibition against drinking wine — 



136 

which was the intoxicating beverage of Palestine— 
save only the command to Aaron, and his posterity, 
(the priesthood,)* not to drink wine nor strong drink 
when going before the congregation," lest they might 
by accident put the clean for the unclean in the holy 
sacrifice of the tabernacle. There were stringent laws 
to maintain the purity of woman, and of the family 
descent. But, there was no suggestion in the law of 
Moses of a peculiar sanctity in a celibate life. The 
Jew was educated to believe marriage honorable, and 
a fruitful posterity a pride and blessing. But, there 
were occasionally men and women who assumed 
the vow of a Nazarite, (which word implies sep- 
aration,) " to separate themselves unto the Lord, 
# # # from wine and strong drink," to eat 
nothing "made of the vine tree, from the kernel 
even to the husk ; " not to permit the hair nor 
the beard to be shorn, to touch no dead body, nor 
to make themselves ritually unclean, for father, 
mother, brother, or sister, " during the days of their 
separation. "f We read of a few persons devoted 
by their parents • for life, while yet unborn, to 
this separation. Samson was one. John the Baptist 
was another. He was sequestered from the world, 

* Leviticus, chapter 10, v. 9, 10. 
t Numbers, chapter 6, v. 2-21. 



137 

living a monkish, or a hermit, life, according to the 
ascetic notions of the Essenes, refusing alike to marry, 
to drink wine, or to live in conformity with the social 
life of Palestine. 

Inspired by a sublime enthusiasm of prophecy, watch- 
ing for the expected Messiah, (but unlike so many 
Jews, who looked for a conquering king, imagining 
Him as coming from Edom, with dyed garments from 
Bozrah, glorious in his apparel, travelling in the 
greatness of his strength, having trodden the wine- 
press alone, now trampling the people in his anger,*) 
John, — stationed by the ford of Jordan, where the 
waters had divided before the ark, amid the rich vege- 
tation and grateful shade of this spot of romantic 
beauty, where so often he is described in painting as 
surrounded by multitudes and performing the initiatory 
rite of salvation, — recognized and proclaimed " the 
Lamb of God, who taketh away the sins of the 
World." 

The Messiah accepted the recognition and the 
baptism of John. But though He did this honor to 
the prophet, and accepted his emblem of the inward 
purifying of the soul, and of the spiritual and celestial 
character of his own coming, (as contrasted with* some 
fierce apparition of triumphant wrath,) the Saviour 

* Isaiah, chapter 63, v. 1-3. 
18 



138 

immediately made clear his own disagreement with 
the dogmas of the Essenes, and the notions of 
asceticism. 

Soon after his baptism, there was a marriage- 
feast. Invited to attend, He joined the festivity. 
In compliance with the wishes of his Mother, 
the wine having failed, Jesus, by miracle, changed 
water into wine, and sent it to the master of the 
feast. " Thus Jesus performed his first miracle at 
Cana, in Galilee, and manifested his glory T % By 
these two actions, of emphatic significance, — that is, by 
attending the marriage-feast and making the wine, — 
our Lord, with the utmost publicity, placed himself 
in unequivocal antagonism to the asceticism of Naza- 
rite and Essene, prevented his baptism from being 
mistaken for any profession of adhesion to the sect, 
the dogmas, or the practices of John ; sanctioned the 
domestic tie, which the Essene contemned ; the use of 
the beverage, which the Nazarite rejected; and the 
friendly enjoyment of innocent festivity. 

On no other theory can we understand the meaning 
of his joining the feast, or working the miracle. In 
the very hour of festivity the dreadful future of his 
Passion was presented to his soul. He sympathized 
with the social joy of others ; but He was sad himself. 

* Gospel of St. John, chapter 2, v. 11. Norton's translation. 



139 

Nor can we regard the miracle as wrought either to 
display his power, or simply for the hilarity of the 
feast. It would be to degrade the character of our 
Lord, and imagine motives to which He never yielded 
in the use of his heavenly gifts. If we perceive in 
his conduct, the evident testimony He bore against 
opinions sincerely held by John, but of which He 
would not even seem to be the adherent, we shall 
better understand the spirit of the occasion, and the 
true character of our Lord, and we shall learn what 
Paul, the apostle, learned perhaps from the story of 
the same miracle, (while Peter needed its revelation in 
vision,) that " The kingdom of God is not meat and 
drink" 

Had Jesus been accessible to ordinary motives, He 
would have adopted, or at least indulged, asceticism. 
It would have given Him a party at the beginning of 
his career. It would have helped Him to defy, or to 
puzzle, the Pharisees, and to turn their weapons. 
But He was absorbed in the infinite purpose of a 
mission which included all human nature, all times, 
all places, and all circumstances of men. 

When the great Apostle to the Gentiles was a 
prisoner in Rome, the Christians in Colosse, one of 
the Phrygian cities, sent Epaphras with messages of 
comfort to Paul. He returned home with " the Epistle 



140 

to the Colossians " in reply. The Greeks had, long 
before the Gospel, introduced their philosophy into 
Asia Minor. And, in Phrygia, the doctrines of both 
Plato and Pythagoras found many disciples ; against 
some of the opinions of both of whom the Epistle is 
in part directed. Besides these, were the teachings of 
Judaisers, endeavoring to impress upon the Christians 
Mosaic observances. In order to attract those Chris- 
tians who had been Platonists or Pythagoreans, it is 
supposed that the Judaisers tried to convince them that 
those philosophers had themselves been taught by 
the writings of Moses. Thus, through Judaisers, of 
the strictly ritualistic, or formalist and purely phari- 
saic school, and through others of the Essene, or 
purely ascetic school, and through Pythagoreans who 
carried out the doctrine of transmigration of souls to 
the logical conclusion of rejecting the flesh of animals 
as food, the infant Christian church of Colosse was in 
peril of dogmatic demoralization. Here, Paul — like 
his Master in the beginning — turned his back upon 
the temptation so plainly set before him. He would 
not humor the peculiarities of any of these several 
schools, all of which, though from different origins, 
might have been combined in a common end of giving 
some formal expression to a higher life, in which 
Greek reason, Oriental mysticism and Jewish rever- 



141 

ence for a divinely given ritual, could have rallied 
around Christianity as a common centre. But the poor 
prisoner hound in Home, would not compromise one 
iota of the simplicity and grandeur of that lofty Faith, 
whose deeper meanings and universal application 
none among the Apostles knew so well. Therefore 
he commanded his converts to avoid alike an empty 
philosophy, the traditions of men, and the elements of 
this world, which are not according to Christ. Abjur- 
ing the theories of the Greeks and the Orientalists, 
the rites of Moses, the intercession of angels, he 
warned them to let no man (whether Greek or Jew, 
Essene, Nazarite or Pythagorean,) judge them in 
respect of meats or drinks ; of partaking animal food, 
or of drinking wine, in the temperate repast of 
Christian Liberty.* 

While the great Apostle was willing, — in tenderness 
to a brother whose weakness demanded charity, — not 
to eat meat nor drink wine, if by eating or drinking 
he would lead to the misapprehension that he was 
recognizing idolatrous worship,")" he placed that wil- 
lingness wholly on the ground of an affectionate con- 
cession, not at all on any ground of any form of asceti- 
cism. Had it been proposed in the Christian church 

* See, among other authorities on this whole subject, " Milman's History 
of Christianity," and " MacKnight on the Epistles." 
t Romans, chapter 14. 



142 

to establish asceticism by creed or discipline, it would 
have aroused the utmost power reposing in the might- 
iest pen ever held by human hand. 

It was left for Mohammed, as a measure of real 
" military necessity," by pretended revelation, to ful- 
minate an interdict. Christianity, the only Religion 
"which is not naturally weakened by civilization," 
which " has traversed the lapse of ages, acquiring a 
new strength and beauty with each advance of civili- 
zation, and infusing its beneficent influence into every 
sphere of thought and action,"* omitted asceticism 
wholly from its plan. It has led the conquering 
march of humanity, under the inspiration of its Foun- 
der, in obedience to immortal hope and celestial love ; 
subordinating passion and appetite, not by the law of 
a carnal commandment, but by the power of an end- 
less life. The Gospel of Jesus preached and testified 
by apostles, evangelists, confessors and martyrs, de- 
scends to no comparison with the Koran of Moham- 
med, whose sword, succeeded by the torch of Omar, led 
the hordes of Islam to the slaughter of the unbelievers.f 

* " Rationalism in Europe," by W. E. H. Lecky. Vol. i., pp. 311, 312. 
(American edition.) 

t See, among other authorities, " Mohammed der Prophet," [Stuttgart. 
1843,] by Gustav Weil, then assistant-librarian, since 1845 Professor of 
Oriental Languages in the University of Heidelberg. At page 140, the 
learned author says : — "The danger which Mohammed incurred from his 
followers addicting themselves to the use of wine, was probably the occa- 
sion of this prohibition." Also, " Essais sur l'histoire des Arabes," etc., 



143 

How much the Mohammedan interdict has been 
worth to the morality of Persia, (whatever was its 
value under military organization, on the march or in 
camp,) may be learned from the testimony of both 
travellers and missionaries : — 

" Prohibiting the use of wine to its followers, tends to 
restrict the manufacture to those places where the Jews, 
Americans, or Hindoos, form part of the population. But 

[Paris, 1847,] by Armand Pierre Caussin de Perceval, Professor of Arabic 
in the College of France, vol. iii, page 122, where he says : — "According 
to the common opinion, it was during one of Mohammed's sieges in the ter- 
ritory of Medina, that he published the verses of the Koran which interdict 
wine and games of chance to the faithful." 

Frederick von Schlegel, in his Lectures on the Philosophy of History, 
(Robertson's Translation, Bohn's edition, page 327,) suggests a second 
motive of Mohammed in making the prohibition. He says : — " Even the 
prohibition of wine was perhaps not so much intended for a moral precept, 
which, considered in that point of view, would be far too severe, as for 
answering a religious design of the founder ; for he might hope that the 
express condemnation of a liquid which forms an essential element of the 
Christian sacrifice, would necessarily recoil on that sacrifice itself, and thus 
raise an insuperable barrier between his creed and the religion of Christ" 
This motive of Mohammed receives corroboration from the fact of his 
desire to proselyte from among the Jews, and from the consideration, (to 
which, however, Schlegel does not refer,) that the prohibition was likely to 
be one not altogether unacceptable to Jews, by reason of its confirmation 
of the antithesis between the Hebrew religion and the Christian religion on 
just this very point of the use of wine, — the only prohibition of its use by 
the Mosaic law being in connection with the religious rites of sacrifice, 
(Leviticus, c. 10, v. 9, 10.) (See also page 128 of this Argument.) Whereas 
it was precisely in the offering of the most significant Christian sacrament, 
(i. e., the Lord's Supper,) that its use was expressly ordained by Jesus, 
(Matthew, c. 26, v. 27. Mark, c. 14, v. 23.) And it is most remarkable, 
that while Moses forbade wine only to the priest, and then only when going 
" into the tabernacle of the congregation," Christianity enjoins the use of 
wine in the only sacrament which is universally administered at the altar 
and in the sanctuary. So deep is the Christian feeling in this precise rela- 
tion of its use to the ceremonies of our religion, that the sale of wine for 
sacramental purposes is the only kind of sale which, by our prohibitory 
law, is free to all persons, at all places, and on all occasions. 



144 

tlie Persians have always been less scrupulous observers 
of this precept of the Koran than the other Mussulmans ; 
and several of their kings, unable to resist the temptation, 
or conceiving themselves above the law, have set an 
example of drunkenness, which has been very generally 
followed by their subjects. * * * At present, many 
persons indulge secretly in wine and generally to intem- 
perance ; as they can imagine no pleasure in its use, 
unless it produce the full delirium of intoxication. They 
flatter themselves, however, that they diminish the sin by 
drinking only such as is made by infidels. * * * The Jews 
and Americans prepare wine on purpose for the Mohamme- 
dans by adding lime, hemp and other ingredients, to increase 
its pungency and strength : for the wine that soonest intoxi- 
cates is accounted the best, and the lighter and more delicate 
kinds are held in no estimation among the adherents of the 
prophet." * 

Its moral influence on Turkey, I leave to the descrip- 
tion of Lord Bacon, who styles Turkey — 

" A Cruel Tyranny, bathed in the blood of their emperors 
upon every succession ; a heap of vassals and slaves ; no- 
nobles, no gentlemen, no freemen, no inheritance of land, 
no stirp of ancient families ; a people that is without 
natural affection, and as the scripture saith, that regardeth 
not the desires of women ; and without piety or care toward 
their children ; a nation without morality, without letters, 

* History of Ancient and Modern Wines. London, 1824. 

See, also, Travels in Georgia and Persia, by Sir It. Kerr Porter, Vol. i., 
p. 348. Voyages de Chardin, Tom. ii., p. 67. 

And, also, " Eight Years in Persia," by Rev. Justin Perkins, (mission- 
ary,) pp. 226, 227, and 402. 



145 



arts or sciences ; that can scarce measure an acre of lajid or 
an hour of the day; base and sluttish in buildings, diet, and 
the like ; and in a word, a very reproach of human society."* 

The influence of entire abstinence upon all the 
different Mohammedan nations and races, to the 
extent the Mohammedan superstition has enforced it 
on the devout, I leave to the able writer of the article 
on " Food," in the Encyclopaedia Brittanica. 

" Many men, as the natives of Bengal and other countries, 
live entirely upon vegetables ; and others, as the Esquimaux, 
altogether upon animal food, while most examples of the 
human species use a mixed diet of animal and vegetable 
matter ; and the majority of people find it most convenient 
to obtain a portion of their supply of carbon from fermented 
drinks, or from drinks distilled from such. The number of 
people who abstain from fermented drinks, however, proves 
that the requisite amount of carbon may be obtained from 
saccharine or oleaginous compounds, the deficiency being in 
general, probably, made up from the latter. There appears, 
nevertheless, to be little doubt but that, in order to attain the 
full perfection of the mental and bodily faculties, an admix- 
ture of animal and vegetable articles of food is essential ; 
and also that a portion of the carbonaceous supply should be 
derived from alcoholic drinks. Those who live almost 
entirely upon animal food become stunted in growth and 
liable to the ravages of scurvy, and their mental and moral 
faculties are blunted and sensual ; those who consume only 

t Lord Bacon's Works, (Boston edition,) Vol. xiii., p. 198, " Touching a 
Holy War." 

19 



146 

vegetables are generally inactive and listless, and incapable 
of either active bodily or mental labor ; and independently 
of other objections, there is reason to fear that the offspring 
of those who abstain entirely from fermented drinks, become 
in a generation or two enervated in mind and body. It is 
probably in this last mentioned manner that the decadence of 
the different Mohammedan nations and races is to be 
accounted for, at least in part." * 

If you could enforce the outward observance of 
apparent conformity on a cowering and hypocritical 
population of unwilling subjects, judge you, by the 
testimony of Dr. Clarke, and of the ministers of 
religion, who know full well the workings of this law 
in the secret places, the devastation you will carry in 
its train. I desire, above all things, to bring the evil 
to the surface. It is safer on the skin than at the 
heart or in the brain. And bad as is the unguarded 
use of " rebellious liquors," it is safer — a hundred 
times safer — to bear with it, until it can be met by 
curing the inward disease of which drunkenness is a 
manifestation, rather than to push the determined con- 
sumers of narcotics to the terrible alternative of opium. 

Literature is full of testimonies against such legisla- 
tion. You find them in essays, in speeches, in history, 
uttered by Cromwell, by Milton, by Burke, by Macaulay, 

* Encyclopaedia Brittanica, (8th edition) ; Article " Food ; " subdivision, 
" The Principles of Dietetics ; " Vol. ix., p. 768. 



147 

and I know not how many besides. " Though you take 
from a covetous man all his treasure," says Milton, 
." he has one jewel left, ye cannot bereave him of his 
covetousness. Banish all objects of lust, shut up all 
youth into the severest discipline that can be exercised 
in any hermitage, ye cannot make them chaste that 
came not thither so. * * * Look how much we 
expel of sin, so much we expel of virtue. * * * This 
justifies the high providence of God, who, though he 
commands us temperance, justice, continence, yet 
pours out before us even to profuseness, all desirable 
things. * * * Why should we then affect a rigor 
contrary to the manner of God and of Nature." * 

Mr. Chairman and Gentlemen, I have spoken boldly, 
as one of the advocates of thirty thousand voters of 
Massachusetts, who, without noise or observation, 
memorialized the General Court. Their opinions have 
been illustrated by more than one hundred witnesses, 
from all quarters of the . Commonwealth. They are 
of nearly all professions and callings, men of learned 
pursuits and those devoted to the cares of busy life, 



* See "Treasures from the Prose Writings of Milton," (by Ticknor & 
Fields,) passages from the " Areopagitica," the "Defence of the People of 
England," etc., pp. 112, 114, 115, 136, 158, and 345-6. 

Burke's Speeches, etc., (Little & Brown's Ed.,) Vol. v., pp. 163, 164. 

Macaulay's History of England, 5th Vol., c. 23, p. 41. (Harper's 

octavo edition.) 



148 o 029 827 260 A 

scholars, clergymen and statesmen, cultivators in the 
various sciences, and of wide renown, men of venerable 
years, and those of younger age. They "are of the 
metropolis, the interior, the mountains of Berkshire, 
the valley of the Connecticut, the shores of Essex, 
the Islands and the Cape. They represent every 
phase of industry, of philanthropy and of wisdom. 
You heard, at the beginning, the eminent gentleman, 
my honored associate, [Hon. Linus Child,] whose life- 
long devotion to whatever is best in morality, in patri- 
otism and religion, has made him a tit exemplar for all 
younger men of generous aspirations. When such as 
he have spoken, I might well have been content with 
silence. With a deep sense of the importance of this 
inquiry, and of the issue it involves, forgetting all things 
but the honor and welfare of our Commonwealth and 
her People, I dedicate this offering of gratitude and 
duty to the Future of Massachusetts. 



ftfSoio 




%e fefcofcs of 



' 



i TRRARY OF CONGRESS 

029 827 260 A 



